CrossFire mainboard

CrossFire mainboard:-

ECS EliteGroup is known for manufacturing feature-rich and cost-effective motherboards. The KA3 MVP Extreme is their fi rst Socket AM2 (successor to Socket 939) board to hit the market. This is a CrossFire board that uses ATI’s Xpress 3200 chipset with two PCI-e 16x slots. A single PCI-e 1x and 2 PCI slots are also squeezed onto the ATX board. The Northbridge and Southbridge have passive heatsinks—the latter being very small in height and size. A 40 mm fl uorescent yellow exhaust fan blows heat from the voltage regulators out of the board. As far as package contents are concerned, this board comes packed with SATA cables, an extra USB/Firewire panel, an additional parallel port bracket and an eSATA bracket. An additional BIOS chip has been provided that can be used to flash problematic fi rmware. Design and layout
This is one colorful board. The PCB is purple and on it you will see orange, red, yellow ochre, blue, bright yellow and green. To complete this riot of color, the PCI slots are accompanied with fl ashing blue diagnostic LEDs. At fi rst glance, the board seems bare with minimum clutter and open space between the memory, Northbridge and the CPU. The 16x PCI-express slots are positioned too close to each other and they are separated by a 1x PCI-e slot and a CMOS battery. There should have been enough space to house two cards with large heatsinks. Performance The motherboard was put through the paces with SiSoft Sandra’s processor and memory benchmarks. The processor scores were up to the mark with other AM2-based boards reviewed earlier. The memory bandwidth recorded a lower score (by about 2-5 percent) as the board accepted the Kingston memory (at default latencies) with a command rate of 2T. On the audio/video encoding front, the scores were acceptable —the audio compression putting a greater amount of load on the processor. Watching a movie while another was being converted to XviD at the same time brought the encode rate down by just 5 fps. Since this is an "Extreme" board, the BIOS provides users with overclocking options to adjust the CPU multiplier and CPU/RAM voltages. In spite of these features, the RAM was unable to work at 1T. For: Loads of USB and SATA connection options are provided. Produced good scores in the encoding tests. Against: Lack of space between the CrossFire PCI-e slots. Test rig Processor: AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 Memory: Kingston KHX8500D2K2 (1066 MHz running at 800 MHz) (5-5-5-15:2T)
Hard drive: Western Digital Raptor 740GD
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce 6800 GS
Performance Scores
PCMark ‘05: 6134
3DMark ‘05: 5213
SiSoft Sandra 2007
Dhrystone (MIPS) : 20378
Whetstone (MFLOPS) : 17206
Memory bandwidth : 7931 MB/s
HDD index : 55 MB/s
HDD sequential read : 68 MB/s
HDD sequential write : 32/52 MB/s
Audio encoding (192kbps – best quality):
624.7 kB/s
Video encoding test: 87.24 fps
Video encoding + playback test: 82.3 fps