ECS: RD480 in the Extreme

Final Words

The ECS KA1 MVP Extreme offers a significant set of features for around US $125. The performance of the board was very competitive in our testing with excellent overclocking capabilities. The stability of the board was very good in our benchmark, gaming sessions, and general application testing. However, the location of the Silicon Image 3132 SATA ports, the VRM cooling fan solution, the Shunt card requirement, and overall performance of the USB and Ethernet controllers detract from an obviously solid offering from ECS.



With that said, let's move on to our performance opinions regarding this board.

In the video area, the inclusion of dual PCI Express x16 connector provides full CrossFire support with eight PCI Express lanes per graphics connector. The performance of the board under CrossFire testing was at times better than our other test boards while maintaining excellent stability across a wide range of games and applications. The performance and stability with the current NVIDIA range of graphics cards was very good in both stock and overclocked settings. However, there are still some display corruption issues during the bios post with the NVIDIA 7900GTX.

The close proximity of the RD480 Northbridge heatsink to the first PCI Express x16 connector will prevent users with modified cooling solutions from utilizing this slot in dual card operation. Our only real issue is the requirement for the Shunt card when utilizing a single graphics card, although this is a requirement for other RD480 based boards. A bios based solution would have been a more elegant switching method, especially for those of us prone to misplacing such cards.

In the on-board audio area, the ECS board offers the Realtek ALC-880D HD audio codec. The audio output of this codec in the music, video, and DVD areas is top notch for an on-board solution. The audio quality in gaming was more than acceptable but did not match the output of the Sound Blaster X-FI. If you plan on utilizing this board for online gaming, then our recommendation is to purchase an appropriate sound card for consistency in frame rates across a wide range of games. Unfortunately, there is only one S/PDIF output and it is a header on the board due to the lack space on the I/O panel. However, the Realtek ALC-880 is recommended for the majority of users looking to save money on a discreet audio solution.

In the storage area, the ECS board offers the full compliment of storage options afforded by the SB450 and SiL3132 chipsets. The board offers RAID 0, 1 capability, and SATA 1.5Gb/s support along with dual channel ATA133 Ultra DMA capability via the SB450. SATA 3Gb/s, NCQ, and Hot Plug capability is provided by the Silicon Image 3132 chipset. The performance of the ATI SATA and IDE controllers were excellent and easily exceeded the nForce4 solutions while matching the ULi M1697 based board.

IEEE 1394 capability is provided by the VIA VT6307 chipset but the PCI backplane or 3.5" drive bay must be utilized to have access to the ports. While our real world application test suite showed a 4% performance decrease of the VIA VT6307 compared to other solutions, HDTach 3.01 showed a 22% reduction in write speeds compared to the other boards. ECS is investigating this issue currently.

The ECS board offers eight ATI USB 2.0 ports when utilizing the two USB 2.0 headers. The performance of the ATI USB 2.0 solution is not competitive with those offered by Intel, NVIDIA, or ULi. However, the USB performance is more than acceptable in actual day to day operations except when utilizing this interface for hard drive or optical storage solutions. We never witnessed any incompatibilities with the USB ports in testing several peripherals.

In the networking area, the ECS board offers the PCI-E based Marvell 88E8053 Gigabit Ethernet controller along with the PCI based Realtek RTL8100C Fast Ethernet controller. Due to either the bios or ATI SB450, the performance of the Marvell controller is far below the results on other boards. ECS has not confirmed a fix but our test results with the latest bios minor improvements in throughput. The Realtek option should have been dropped from this board or at least replaced with a PCI Gigabit offering.

In the performance area, the ECS board generated excellent benchmark scores across the board while maintaining very good stability during testing and general usage. The board's overclocking performance was average at best until the 1.1d release that really shows the actual capability of the board now. While the current overclocking levels and bios options will not be acceptable for the hardcore overclocking crowd, they should suffice nicely for the general enthusiast users.



What else can we say about this paradox of a board? While the performance of the SB450 is lacking in certain areas and peripheral performance is an issue, the SATA 1.5Gb/s and IDE performance along with availability is certainly not. The layout is a bit quirky but with the right components it works beautifully. The colors are a bit disjointed for our tastes but works well in modded cases for those looking to trip the lights fantastic. The US $125 price is high when compared to other solutions such as the Abit AT-8, EPoX EP-9U1697-GLI, or Asus A8R-MVP but is more than acceptable when comparing it to the DFI LANParty UT RDX200, Asus A8N-SLI Premium, or Asus A8R32-MVP. The benchmark, game, general application, and overclocking performance numbers that were average are now very good to excellent. In the end, this is what the board should be judged on and for those reasons we have gone from merely tolerating the board to really embracing it. Oh, what a difference a bios makes.

04/04/2006 Update- ECS provided us a bios release today to solve the PCI throughput issues with the Firewire and Ethernet controllers. We will test this bios shortly to see what effect it has on the PCI throughput issues and performance in general. We would like to commend the ECS engineering staff for their responsiveness in correcting issues while improving the stability and performance of this platform. This level of customer service should be a very important consideration in determining what manufacturer you choose when purchasing a motherboard.