The Color Purple
Imagine the color purple and you'll immediately think of ECS (Elitegroup) motherboards. Since last year, ECS has been branding their boards with purple PCBs (printed circuit boards) and although it is a rather unusual color to use, it is still pretty unique in its own way. Of course, most of the time, people couldn't care less about the color as you will seldom have the board opened out on display in your system. Besides, your eyes would be normally glued to the screen and not the motherboard. So, at the end of the day, the color and design of the motherboard will only serve its purpose in the retail shelves (so that it would catch the consumer's attention), and that alone, is a good enough reason for any manufacturer to beautify the way their board looks.
The ECS K7VTA3 is based on the VIA KT333 chipset and it comes with a fair bit of features for the power user. The board adopts a very standard layout with five PCI connectors and three DDR333 DIMM slots. The board comes with very bare accessories which includes the motherboard, a user's guide, a floppy drive cable, an ATA133 IDE cable, an I/O faceplate and a driver CD. Just like most of ECS' budget conscious boards, the K7VTA3 will not come with any fancy brackets and connectors as ECS believes in bringing affordable products to the user.
The specifications of the board is listed the table below :-
ECS K7VTA3 Technical Specifications
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Processor
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- Socket A for AMD Athlon / AMD Athlon XP / AMD Duron
- AMD processors at 600MHz to 1.8GHz or higher
- Support for 200 / 266MHz FSB
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Chipset
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- VIA KT333 North Bridge
- Supports DDR333 memory technology up to 3GB
- 200 / 266MHz front side bus
- AGP 2x/4x
- VIA VT8233A South Bridge
- High bandwidth V-Link client controller
- 2-channel Ultra ATA 133/100/66/33 Bus Mastering IDE controller
- Supports up to four USB ports
- Supports AC-97 audio and MC-97 modem codec
- PCI 2.2 interface
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Cache memory
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- CPU Built-in 256KB (Athlon/Athlon XP) or 64KB (Duron) L2 cache
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System memory
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- 3 x 184-pin DDR SDRAM DIMM
- Supports DDR 200/266/333 DIMM Module
- Supports 2.5V unbuffered DDR SDRAM
- Supports a maximum of 3GB of memory with 1GB DIMM
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PCI IDE
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- 2 x bus master UDMA-33/66/100/133 IDE ports (up to 4 devices)
- Support for PIO, UDMA-33, UDMA-66, UDMA-100 and UDMA-133 IDE
- Built-in Promise PDC20265 ATA-100 IDE/RAID controller for up to an
additional 4 IDE devices supporting RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring)
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I/O Interface
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- 1x floppy port (360KB - 2.88MB)
- 2x serial ports
- 1x parallel port (SPP/EPP/ECP)
- 1x PS/2 Keyboard
- 1x PS/2 Mouse
- 4x USB 2.0 ports (2x rear I/O panel, 2x on-board via header) - based
on VIA VT6202
- 1x SIR header for serial infrared connection
- Audio ports for on-board sound (Line-Out, Line-In, Mic)
- 1x Game port
- 1x RJ45 10/100Mbps LAN port
- 2x fan headers
- 1x WOL header
- 1x WOM header
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Expansion slots
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- 5x 32-bit PCI slots, PCI 2.2 compliant
- 1x AGP (2x/4x mode) slot - AGP 2.0 compliant
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Power Management
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- Enhanced ACPI for Win98 / 2000 / Me / XP compatibility
- Power-on by switch, LAN, modem, RTC alarm
- Power-off by Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/NT shut down and switch
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Form Factor
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- ATX Form Factor : 30.5cm x 24.4cm
- Fits into regular ATX case
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BIOS
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- 2 Mbit (256KB) Flash ROM
- Award Flash BIOS with PnP, Green, DMI and ACPI support
- Multi-boot on LS120, ZIP, ATAPI CD-ROM, SCSI, IDE #1, #2, #3, #4
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