The latest of ECS's Extreme offerings is the KA1 MVP, a Socket 939 motherboard that combines ATI's Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition chipset with PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet and Serial ATA RAID. That looks like a decent spec on paper; however, we enthusiasts are a picky lot, and we demand more than just an "Extreme" moniker and checkbox features. Read on to see if the KA1 MVP delivers the performance, BIOS, layout, and extras needed to back up ECS's intentions.

The specs

The KA1 MVP's spec sheet has just about everything you'd expect from a high-end enthusiast motherboard, starting with a chipset capable of multi-GPU graphics. In this case, ECS is doing multi-GPU with ATI's Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition north bridge, which can split 16 lanes of PCI Express evenly between a pair of CrossFire-capable graphics cards. The north bridge also has an additional six lanes of PCI Express, four of which are consumed by the board's pair of x1 slots, its PCI-E Marvell Gigabit Ethernet controller, and a Silicon Image Serial ATA RAID chip.

So what about those extra two lanes of PCI Express on the north bridge? Those are actually used as the chipset interconnect between the north bridge and south bridge chips. Using a couple of standard PCI Express lanes gives the interconnect 500MB/s of bandwidth in each direction, and perhaps more importantly, allows the north bridge chip to interface with one of several different ATI and ULi south bridge chips.

Unfortunately, ECS doesn't take advantage of the potential for an ATI/ULi chipset pairing. Instead, the KA1 MVP comes with ATI's older SB450 south bridge. The SB450 sports High Definition Audio and four Serial ATA ports, but it lacks support for Native Command Queuing (NCQ), 300MB/s Serial ATA transfer rates, and RAID 0+1 or 5 arrays. We've also encountered persistent I/O issues with the SB450 that can slow both USB and PCI performance.

While the SB450/s I/O performance woes likely won't be fixed until ATI's next-gen south bridge appears, ECS has managed to sidestep some of the chip's other limitations. For example, the KA1 MVP's auxiliary Silicon Image Serial ATA RAID chip supports both NCQ and 300MB/s transfer rates. The board's PCI Express Marvell Gigabit Ethernet controller also makes up for the SB450's lack of integrated GigE. However, the secondary Realtek 10/100 Fast Ethernet chip is a bit of a curiosity. Fast Ethernet is an order of magnitude slower than Gigabit, and with most enthusiast boards rocking dual GigE ports, 10/100 feels unnecessarily cheap.