Review: ECS KV2 Extreme - Mainboard - HEXUS.net

System Setup and Notes

Hardware

Motherboards

ECS KV2 Extreme, VIA K8T800 Pro, Socket 939. AGP8X, DDR
Shuttle SN959G5 w/ Shuttle FN95, nForce3 250 Ultra, Socket 939, AGP8X, DDR
ASUS SK8V, VIA K8T800, Socket 940, AGP8X, DDR

Processors

AMD Athlon FX-53, Socket 938, 1MB L2
AMD Athlon FX-51, Socket 940, 1MB L2

Graphics Cards

ASUS Radeon 9800 XT, AGP8X, 256MB

Memory

512MB (2 x 256MB) Corsair XMS3200LLPT DDR-I PC-3200 - 2-2-2-6 (KV2, FN95)
1GB (2 x 512MB) Corsair XMS3500RE, DDR-I PC-3500 - 2-3-2-6 (SK8V)

Hard Disks

1 x 36.6GB Western Digital Raptor SATA

Software

Windows XP Professional w/ SP1
VIA Hyperion 4.51v (KV2, SK8V)
NVIDIA nForce Unified Driver 4.27 (FN95)
ATI CATALYST 4.1
DirectX 9.0b End User Runtime

HEXUS Pifast
Sciencemark 2.0
KribiBench v1.1
LAME 3.92MMX encoding U2's Pop album at 192CBR
Realstorm Raytracing Benchmark
3DMark 2001SE
3DMark03
Painkiller

Notes

K8T800 Pro (KV2) versus nForce3 250 Ultra (FN95) this time around, using FX-53 on Socket 938. I've added in my SK8V running FX-51 at FX-53 to the graphs, for a comparison with a first generation AMD64 core logic.

It's the usual suite of tests drives that the analysis, split into three groups (memory, CPU, graphical). Onwards to the graphs.