Overclocking Results:

stock max. oc motherboard speed: 200 mhz 305 mhz if you're new to Overclocking and not sure what to do, check out these two excellent Guides for some pointers: Overclocking the CPU and Memory Overclocking the Videocard

I started off slowly and increased the clock speed in 2-3 MHz intervals. As it turns out, that was a mistake.... I could have gone up in leaps and bounds seeing as the ECS KA1-MVP Extreme overclocked pretty well. The motherboard broke the 230, 250 and 270 MHz plateaus without much difficulty.

The ECS KA1-MVP Extreme motherboard then cracked the 300 MHz barrier, which is rather impressive, but ended up with an overclocked speed of 305 MHz. Anything higher and the motherboard would not load WindowsXP.

Next up we dive head first into the benchmarks, but first a quick tour of what the BIOS has to offer.

Options in the BIOS

ECS is focusing a lot of attention on its retail operations and boards like the KA1-MVP Extreme have decent tweaks. Below are screen shots of the BIOS which will be of interest to enthusiasts.

The ECS KA1-MVP Extreme has the usual memory timing adjustments we have come to expect from Athlon64 motherboards.

Users can adjust the processor multiplier in whole values or increase the CPU voltage to a maximum of 1.675V (1.55V Hammer Vid Control and CPU Voltage Adjust +175mV). The motherboard clock speed can be set between 200-500 MHz in 1 MHz increments and the memory voltage goes as high as 3.0V.

Prelude to Benchmarks

The details of how the ECS KA1-MVP Extreme videocard test system was configured for benchmarking, including the specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions are indicated below. In the second column are the general specs for the reference platforms this Radeon CrossFire Xpress 1600 videocard is to be compared against. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results.

Please note that a PCI Express ATI Radeon Master card could not be sourced at the time of this writing, so we are unable to provide any Crossfire benchmarks in this review. To keep the benchmarks comparable with nForce4 based motherboards, a MSI NX7800GTX PCI Express videocard was utilized.

PCSTATS Test System Configurations

test system reference system processor: amd Athlon64 4000+ Clock Speed: 12 x 200 MHz = 2.4 GHz Motherboard: ECS KA1-MVP Extreme (RXpress 1600) Albatron K8X890 Pro II (K8T890) MSI RS480M2-IL (RS480) ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 (ULi M1695) Chaintech Zenith VNF4 Ultra (NF4 Ultra) MSI K8N Diamond Plus (NF4 SLI x16) ABIT AN8 32X (NF4 SLI x16) DFI LANPartyUT NF4 SLI-DR Expert (NF4 SLI) DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR (NF4 SLI) Videocard: MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E Memory: 2x 512MB OCZ Gold GX PC3500 DDR Hard Drive: 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 CDROM: AOpen Combo 52x PowerSupply: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510 SLI Heatsink: Athlon64 4000+ Reference Heatsink Software Setup: Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 nVIDIA Forceware 6.70 nVIDIA Forceware 84.20 Benchmarks: SYSMark 2004 Business Winstone 2004 Content Creation 2004 Super Pi SiSoft Sandra 2005 PCMark05 3DMark05 3DMark06 UT2004 FarCry Doom 3 Quake 4