First Look At ECS Crossfire Boards

Though Crossfire, ATI's method of scaling 2 or more ATI Pci-Ex video cards together, is not anywhere near as common as nVidia's SLI is, it's out there and will likely pick up quite a bit. ECS is advertising some of their newer boards as 'crossfire-ready' (no doubt due to their partnering with ATI), and are showing off the new boards, sporting two types of chipsets from ATI. This is a bit of a surprise coming from ECS as they are typically a lower end manufacturer, using cheaper VIA chipsets in their boards. The KA1 MVP, KA2 MVP and PA1 MVP, however, all sport fancy ATI chipsets. The PA1 uses the RD400 and SB450, the KA1 uses the RD480, and the KA2 uses the very fancy RD580 chipset. The latter two support a screaming 2000Mhz Hypertransport link, necessary for the fastest of the Athlon 64 processors..

This isn't a review, so don't expect benchmarks. Photographs of the boards are shown along with detail specs on what they will include. ECS is of course keeping their dark-purple mainboards with very bright color schemes. Gigabit networking is definitely taking off, as all three of these boards, despite coming from ECS, come with Gigabit LAN onboard.