ECS KA3 MVP Extreme Motherboard Review

More Features (Cont’d)

In Figure 7 you can also see VIA VT6308 chip, which provides two FireWire (IEEE 1394a) ports to this motherboard. This motherboard, however, comes with an I/O bracket for only one port. This board also has 10 USB 2.0 ports, four soldered on the motherboard back panel and six available through I/O brackets (this motherboard comes with a bracket for just two USB ports).

KA3 MVP Extreme has two LAN ports, one Gigabit Ethernet produced by the chipset together with Agere E1310I chip, which is in charge of making the physical layer interface, and one Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps), controlled by Realtek RTL8100C.

This motherboard has an eight-channel on-board audio solution, produced by the chipset with the aid of Realtek ALC883 codec, which has an 95 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for its output and an 85 dB signal-to-noise ratio for its input, which is fair enough for the average user but not the best for audiophiles and people that work professionally with digital audio editing. On the other hand, this codec supports a 24-bit resolution. This board also has coaxial and digital SPDIF outputs soldered on the motherboard back panel and also independent outputs for each pair of channels, which definitely helps a lot setting up a 7.1 analog speaker system.

Figure 8: Back panel of KA3 MVP Extreme motherboard.

On the memory side, KA3 MVP Ext
reme has four DDR2-DIMM sockets, supporting up 32 GB up to DDR2-800. On this motherboard sockets 1 and 2 are orange and sockets 3 and 4 are purple. To use DDR2 dual channel mode just install each module on sockets with the same color.

In Figure 9, you can see all cables and adapters that come with this motherboard: four SATA cables, two 80-wire IDE cable, one floppy disk drive cable, one SATA power adapter for two SATA devices, one port multiplier I/O bracket (to use with one of the extra SATA ports controlled by Jmicron JMB363), one LAN cross-over cable (for connecting two PCs without using a hub/switch/router), one I/O bracket containing two USB ports and one FireWire (IEEE 1394a) port, one I/O bracket for the parallel port and an front panel module for installing the USB and FireWire ports on the front panel of your PC case.

Figure 9: Cables and adapters that come with this motherboard.