ATI's CrossFire dual graphics technology has had a protracted and painful birth, but now more products are becoming available that support the technology. One of the latest motherboards to appear is the KA1 MVP Extreme from ECS; the company's first AMD CrossFire platform.

Built around AMD's Socket 939, the board uses ATI's RD480 Northbridge and SB450 Southbridge combination and, in a bid to keep the noise down, both bridges are passively cooled. The only fan on the board sits in a small duct keeping the MOSFETS cool.

As with many ECS boards, at first glance it appears that the company has forgotten a few components; there seem to be acres of real-estate left empty. Closer inspection shows that most of the features you'd expect on today's motherboard are there; Dual LAN, one of which is Gigabit Ethernet, integrated 7.1 audio, support for four ATA devices, four SATA ports and just for good measure two SATA II 3Gb/s ports which are controlled by a Silicon Image chip. Added to these are four DDR1 memory slots (supporting Dual Channel), two x16 PCI-E slots, two x1 PCI-E slots and two ordinary PCI slots.

The board is not without some issues with its layout. The Northbridge is very close to the CPU socket, so you may struggle fitting a third-party cooler. The positioning of the main SATA ports poses problems with larger graphics cards, but this board isn't the only one with that particular problem. Perhaps most irritating of all are the tiny locking latches for the two x16 PCI-E graphics slots; they really do cause problems with larger cards, not to mention sore fingers.

A neat touch is the inclusion of a second BIOS chip in the box. This Top Hat flash chip fits over the original chip on the board should the original get infected by a virus or, more likely, refuse to work after you have flashed it.

Talking of the BIOS, the KA1's has enough tweakablity to keep most overclockers happy. Two options are provided - manual and dynamic - and with the dynamic option you can select between 2MHz and 30MHz in 2MHz steps. In manual mode you can adjust the FSB up to 500MHz. There's also adjustment for memory latency, the CPU Muliplier can be changed from 4x up to 25x and the voltages for both memory and CPU can be tweaked.

The board ran stably out of the box giving a Sysmark 04SE score of 214, which is impressive. To test the graphics we used a couple of brand new ATI X1900XTX cards. Using a single card we recorded a 3DMark05 score of 6,450 while in CrossFire mode the two cards gave a score of 11,900. Enough said.

ECS's first AMD based CrossFire motherboard isn't without its faults but it does run very stably straight out of the box and its low price should make it an attractive board for those wanting to try ATI's latest graphics technology.