| #750 - ECS KA3 MVP Motherboard |
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| Written by Zach Jeffers | |
| Saturday, 04 November 2006 | |
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Page 4 of 10
A Closer Look - Accessories: Taking a look at the expansion ports, we have the USB 2.0, Firewire and SATA accessories. The USB 2.0 and Firewire expansion port comes with an optional 3.5” cage so that you can transfer these to the front of your case if your case lacks these features. The length of the expansion cables are not that long and I was unable to get the cables to reach the front of the test system’s Ultra Aluminus mid tower case. If you are able to get the cables to reach, all you would have to do is unscrew the ports from the expansion bay bracket and screw them into their 3.5” cage. For SATA, ECS has provided you four internal SATA cables. The motherboard has six total SATA connections and it would have been nice to have seen the numbers match, but most retail storage disks come with their own SATA cables so that should not be an issue. Also includes is the female four pin Molex to dual SATA power connectors. There is also an included eSATA expansion bracket. Though this is not quite widely used yet, it is nice to have it included. In my opinion, this should have been included in the optional expansion to 3.5” cage, but that is just my opinion.   As mentioned in the ECS has included a black Floppy and two black EATA cables. The black was a very nice touch, but more interesting is that ECS included a 40 and 80 conductor EATA cables. All three cables are marked appropriately and if they are used, you should use the 80 conductor for storage drives and the 40 conductor for optical drives as the storage drives require the extra 40 wires for signal separation.  The included User’s Manual was a very nice change of pace as far as manuals go. The manual was easy to read and use with clear and concise, color, pictures.   This next object might just look like an included replacement BIOS chip, but in reality, it is your BIOS’ best friend! It is the TopHat. This is ECS’s version of Gigabytes Dual-Bios or Asus’ CrashFree BIOS. Simply place the TopHat on the BIOS chip when the computer crashes, due to misjudgment in BIOS modification, and *poof*, your BIOS is restored to factory specification.    |