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#750 - ECS KA3 MVP Motherboard |
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Written by Zach Jeffers
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Saturday, 04 November 2006 |
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Page 5 of 10
A Closer Look - Layout:
Taking a look at the KA3 MVP motherboard, you can see that it carries out ECS’ past habits of a crazy mixed match of colors. It would have been nice to see a consistency of color here, but some of the colors do have their reasons. For example, the last PCI 2.3 slot is yellow, rather than white. This is due to this channel being classified by ECS as “PCI Extreme” and is said, “This slot can provide ultra signal quality for outstanding audio and video card performance.” We will see later what, if any, effect this has on sound.
   
Starting at the bottom left of the motherboard you will find the secondary white EATA cable header and the front switch and LED headers. Under the front headers, you will find the header for the gaming port expansion. This is a bit of an awkward place in my opinion. I would think that it would be more towards the rest of the audio jumpers etc. To the right of the headers, you will find a red CMOS clearing jumper. This jumper is conveniently tabbed at the top for easy removal. To the right of the jumper, you will find your first two, red primary, internal SATA headers and below these you will find your first three pin case fan power header. In the picture, just to the right of the top red SATA header, you will see a small chip with a white sticker on it. This is the BIOS chip and it is where you would place your TopHat BIOS back up if so needed. Next you will find the last four orange internal SATA headers. This is where you would be connecting your SATA RAID arrays. Lastly you will find the primary EATA header. EATA is slowly being phased out and anybody looking at building a ‘future-proof’ system should look into buying all SATA drives.
In the last image you could see a very unique South Bridge heat sink. This heat sink is made of all aluminum and is secured by a tension arm and a very sticky thermal interface. Around the perimeter of the heat sink, you will see the word EXTREME spelt out with interconnecting E’s.
At the bottom right quadrant of the motherboard, you will find the four Dual Channel DDR2 slots with the corresponding pairs highlighted by orange or purple colored slots. Below these are the 20/24 pin ATX power header and the Floppy drive cable header. If you noticed, right below the DDR2 slots, to the right of the capacitors, you will find a red LED. This is what ECS calls an Anti-Burn LED. All this does is let you know when you are safe to remove or add memory modules. Once the LED turns off, it is safe to do the necessary tasks. In reality this only lasts a split second after you have turned off the system, but if you have a power supply that is supplying power to the motherboard after the power has been turned off, this will let you know.
  
At the top left of the motherboard you will find, going down the side, the CD-In header, the Front Audio headers, the second of your case fan power headers, two orange Firewire headers, three yellow USB 2.0 headers and lastly a green internal speaker header. To the right of these headers, you find the yellow PCI Extreme slot, a ‘normal’ white PCI (2.3) slot, PCIE x16 slot (PCIE1), PCIE x1 slot, PCIE x16 slot (PCIE3) and lastly a female four pin Molex power connector for use in CrossFire configurations.
 
Between the two PCI (2.3) slots, between the white PCI(2.3) and the orange PCIE x16 slot, and between the PCIE x1 and the blue PCIE x 16 slot, you will see there are clear 5mm LEDs. These are actually blue in color when they are on. These are called the Doctor LEDs. All they do is blink if there is no connection made on, or there are errors on the PCI bus. If there is a component installed and working properly, then they say on solid without blinking. There are some people that complain about them blinking or that there is no option to turn them off, but after testing the board, I can say that if you have any kind of video cards (especially dual cards) and/or a sound card, you will not even notice these.
To the right of the expansion slots, you will find the Crossfire Xpress 3200 North Bridge’s heat sink. This is an all aluminum heat sink and is comprised of ten straight fins and a ‘T’ shaped fin in the middle. Looking at the nVidia based 590 chipset; most boards are coming with special cooling solutions ranging from exotic copper fin and heatpipe systems, to less complicated aluminum finned systems. The CrossFire Xpress 3200 North Bridge chipset was completely redesigned from the ground up and is built on a TSMC 110-nanometer process and contains few transistors (around 22 million!). The entire north bridge silicon is just under about 40mm square and is said to put off only about 8 watts of heat under normal operating conditions!
 
Looking at the AM2 socket, you can see that ECS has carried on the tradition of eye catching color with their bright orange HSF retention bracket. Between the bracket and the back I/O cluster, there are the power MOSFETs and the four pin 12v power connector.
  
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Motherboards 
