Thoughts
Despite the downside presented on the previous page, the PA1 MVP has a lot going for it. Good features; good overall performance; great layout; good bundle and presentation; all things worth buying a mainboard for. Crossfire, while it might not mean much to the gamer especially since it's an Intel mainboard, does mean that you've got another PCI Express slot on the board to do with as you wish.Indeed, during the course of the evaluation I spent some time fiddling with two NVIDIA graphics accelerators on this very mainboard and running four DVI displays using the PA1 MVP brought a smile to my face. The only problem is that you can get that on numerous mainboards and certainly mainboards I consider more attractive which carry the hallowed Socket 939 and DDR memory slots.
It pains me to say so but being a solid, dependable mainboard - even at a pretty excellent £90 including VAT - sometimes isn't enough to make a recommendation. There are better Pentium 4 mainboards out there (and ECS sell some of them!) and currently Crossfire is fairly forgettable. Overclocking the PA1 was an exercise in frustration although it appears a coming BIOS might solve some of those problems. Stability was there to go with all the other upsides.
As a cheap, solid Intel mainboard with two PEG16X slots, the PA1 MVP Extreme is worth consideration. For almost every other scenario there are better boards out there. Nothing wrong that's really attributable to ECS, the platform itself does the dissuading.
HEXUS Awards
