Legit Reviews

Legit Motherboard Reviews

ECS KA3MVP Extreme Motherboard - ECS Tries Enthusiast

The Bios

ECS decided to go with the typical Award bios, which as always, is easy to navigate through.  At first glance, there is nothing "Extreme" about the actual bios itself.  Let's look at a few of the more interesting aspects of it.

The Advanced Chipset page is where you will find the DRAM settings, as well as LDT and PCIe setups.

Under the DRAM settings we find nearly everything we need to make our ram run at its fullest potential.  Our ram divider/multiplier is here, as well as settings for all of your ram timings.   Oh wait!  Let's look again, there is no place to set Cas or the command rate.  The board automatically set the cas for our Adata DDR2 800 at 5, and a command rate of 2t.  Certainly this had to be a mistake!  This is an "Extreme" board!  But careful inspection of every area of the bios, and a bios flash later revealed that this board fails to be extreme in the area of ram.  I was very disappointed to find this out.  Legit Reviews sent an email to ECS to ask about this, and as of about 10 days later, it has yet to be answered.  ECS get a thumbs down on "Extreme" email answering.

The Integrated Peripherals page is where you will set up all of your drives for RAID or IDE.  You also will enable and disable you lan, sound, IEEE1394 and other such items from this page of the bios.

I will say that ECS certainly looks "Extreme" on this page of the bios.  There are many settings for the PCIe configuration here, although there is no explanation of them in the manual.  Some are obvious though, and will help in your setup.

"Extreme" is hardly a word i would use for the vcore options onthis board either.  It goes up to 1.35v, which is absolutely horrible for an overclocker.

There are other voltages that are included here.  You can adjust the HTT and Northbridge voltages to +.15v over stock.  DDR2 can be taken all the way up to +.35 over stock.  The CPU clock can be taken all the way up to 500, which is more than enough.  All in all, the only disappointment in voltages is the vcore.  It will surely be something that holds back overclocking onthis board.

The Health page shows up plenty of information that we need, giving us the temps, fan speeds and voltages that are important to keep track of.  That is really everything you need to see in the bios.  Nothing that I would consider "Extreme," but average.

Next Page - The Test Setup

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