ECS KN1 SLI Extreme Motherboard

Reviews: Hardware

Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Nicholas Hart
Kurtis
ECS
Feb. 7, 2006

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Board Layout

When I pulled the motherboard out of the box I immediately noticed how clean it looked. I would almost call its appearance "sparse' as there were many open areas without any components on them. One of the big open areas is between the two x16 slots where some boards would have the "paddle' selector for SLI operation. This doesn't exist on the KN1 SLI Extreme, which leaves a very large purple patch in its place. Near the front of the board you see that ECS even had enough room to put a large metal badge emblazoned with their "Extreme' logo. Yet, even with all this apparently unused space, this board has all the features you would expect from a premium board.

The layout of the board seems very logical and well done. The power connectors are located near the top edge of the board close to, in most cases, the power supply. The 4-pin connector is actually somewhat hidden by the rear fan shroud behind the PS2 connectors. I thought this was a great place for it as it made cable routing pretty easy with the cable not having to be strung over any other components.

The components around the CPU socket are mostly low-profile and even the taller ones shouldn't interfere with most CPU heatsinks. I used a Zalman 7000Cu cooler and had plenty of room on all sides. I'm fairly certain I could have even used the much larger Zalman 7700 although I probably would have had to move the memory to slots three and four.

Fan connectors on the KN1 SLI Extreme are not scarce and are well-placed. The CPU fan connector is right by the CPU bracket with the rear fan shroud connector also located in close proximity. For case fans and the chipset fan, there is a row of three connectors in plain view on the front edge of the board; no need to hunt around for open connectors.

The four SATA ports provided by the chipset are located suspiciously close to the chipset cooler, but caused no problems for me when using them. There are an additional two SATA ports courtesy of an included Silicon Image "SATALink' controller located nearby the main bank of ports.

On the left edge of the board are the headers for all of the peripherals and front panel buttons/LEDs/audio jacks. Everything is color coded and all have silkscreen labels by the connector for easy identification. The front panel connector block also has a silk screen on the board so that you don't have to break out the manual but you have to look for it "around the corner' so to speak as it isn't right next to the block.

The two x16 slots have a x1 slot in between them but, unlike many other boards, it is spaced far enough away from the right-most slot that you can still use it even with a double-width video card. You will, however, lose out on the first PCI slot if you choose to run the second x16 slot with a double-width card. I don't consider this a major issue as I don't think most people use 3 PCI slots anyway. Getting cards out of the x16 slots is different in most boards as the retention levers that help to lock the card in the place aren't the normal press down type. Rather you lift the front of the card and the lifting of the PCB will act to push on the levers for you. If you try and push the levers yourself, it's a little tough as they are almost entirely hidden by the card when it's in place.

As we near the end of our grand motherboard PCB tour we reach the BIOS chip which is of the much loved Phoenix BIOS variety. Nearby is an ITE hardware monitoring chip so you can keep track of your system's health from the BIOS or the included software. Then we come to a Realtek ALC850 audio codec which provides the eight channel audio for this board. There are two network controllers on the KN1 SLI Extreme but they are certainly not equal. The Marvell chip operates over PCI Express and gives you gigabit networking capability while the Realtek chip uses the PCI bus and provides only 10/100 operation.

The rear panel of the KN1 SLI Extreme looks a bit odd with the neon green fan shroud there but the standard connectors are all present. Unless you consider a parallel port standard, in which case!what are you still doing using a parallel port?!?!? This is a gaming board not a dot-matrix print server! Sorry. Anyway, there are the dual NIC ports, four USB ports, analog audio, SPDIF and even an optical audio output. I never noticed this before on other optical audio connectors, but the optical output constantly glows red through its protective little cover. The shape of the connector plus the glow reminds of the "traps' from Ghostbusters.

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Page 2 of 8

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Board Layout
Page 3: Bundles and Extras
Page 4: Software (and fun with Tech Support)
Page 5: Test Setup and Synthetic Benchmarks
Page 6: Real-World Benchmarks
Page 7: Overclocking
Page 8: Conclusion

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