ECS KA3MVP Extreme Motherboard – ECS Tries Enthusiast

Update: A New Bios

UPDATE: ECS did send us another bios after we contacted them
for a second time. We saw the mention of a new bios on another site
that had reviewed this board, and immediately we contacted ECS to get
it.

It was not long after I finished my article that we here at Legit Reviews heard from ECS about a bios that would address the issues that we found on the KA3 Extreme board. And it did address these things.

First off, the ram timings that were missing, Cas and command rate, were now present and are working fine. This is great news for those who like to have full control over their systems.

With these settings now available to be manually set, we ran a few of our benchmarks over to give you an idea of how the 4-4-4-12 and 1t timings affected performance.

As you can see, and as expected, the ability to set the timings to Cas4 and 1T helped our scores out. The bios proved to help in overclocking a bit as well. Take a look at our new results using the 10x multiplier:

We were able to get the board stable up to an HTT of 284. This is a good increse over the previous limit of 270 with this multiplier. We could go a little higher, but it was not stable at all. 300HTT was no where in site on this board with our setup, though we have been able to to do it with ease on a few other boards.

Our stock multiplier results also faired much better, as we were able to get the board up to 230 without any issues at all. Clearly, someone at ECS finally took the time to do some tweaking of the bios, and ended up with some good results. I would still say that the overclocking is still no where near extreme on this board, but it is much better than with the previous bios that we were using.

I was still diappointed to see that the vcore was still stuck at 1.35v. I am sure that we may have been able to do a little better on this board with more juice available. I am not sure if ECS will give us that for this board or not, we can only hope.

For now, my opinion of the board is slightly better that before. I still think that the board could be better with a few more bios tweaks, but overall, I would say that this board is perfect for the mild to averqage overclocker, and for the individual who likes to run things at stock settings. Once again, if ECS does happen to contact us in the near future with another new bios that helps this board out, we will let you know!