ECS
has been making motherboards for sometime now, you couldn't really
say they were enthusiast overclocking machines, as they have always
been more focused on the inexpensive end of the spectrum. Not
long ago there was rumor that ECS was looking to acquire a more
“enthusiast” oriented motherboard manufacturer. It appears
that they have instead, decided to go this route on their own
terms by introducing the “EliteGroup” series.
Today I am writing about the ECS
KN1 SLI Extreme motherboard which is a part of that enthusiast’s
lineup that ECS has developed.
Among some of the features built into this main board are 7.1
(8ch) surround sound audio, 10/100/1000Base-Tx and a BIOS recover
mechanism called “Top-Hat Flash”. Let’s look
over all of the specifications.
Specifications
Form
factor: ATX
Chipset: nVidia nF4 SLI
CPU: Socket 939 supporting the AMD Athlon 64, AMD Athlon 64FX
(55 and 57) AMD and Athlon 64 X2
FSB: 2000 MT/s HyperTransport Interface
BIOS: Award BIOS with 4MB Flash ROM
Memory: 4 DDR DIMMS / Max 4GB / Dual Channel capable
PCIe: 2 – x16 / 1 - x1
NIC: Realtek 10/100 and Marvell 10/100/1000
IDE: nF4 SLI - 2x ATA133 / 4x SATA-II (RAID 0/1/0+1)
SiL3132 – 2x SATA-II (RAID 0/1)
Audio: Realtek ALC850 8-Channel CODEC with S/PDIF Optical/Copper
Out
Ports: USB 2.0 (4 rear, 3x2 headers) / PS2 (2) / IEEE-1394 (2
headers)
Misc: Anti-Burn LED / PCI LED Indicator / Top-Hat Flash BIOS recovery
/ Rounded Corners for strength and safety / Full Color Manual
ECS has not skimped when it comes to what’s on the motherboard.
ECS packages the motherboard box within a sleeve, with everything
decorated nicely, I do like the new scheme they have chosen. Once
inside we see the motherboard and all of the goodies sent along,
let’s do a quick inventory here to see what we have.
1
SLI bridge connector
1 Top-Hat Flash
1 Dual USB / Dual FireWire cable w/rear bracket (also a 3.5”
front mount substitute bracket)
4 Orange SATA cables
1 LPT cable
1 FireWire cable w/rear bracket.
2 IDE Ribbon cables
1 Floppy ribbon cable
1 Molex to (2) SATA power cable
1 Driver CD
1 Software Application CD
1 Manual
I
must admit, I am impressed with what ECS has included in their
packaging. Not that there are highly touted games or high end
UV reactive cables, but an inclusive package of goodies none
the less.
I
like the ability to use either a rear bracket or the optional
3.5” drive bay mount bracket for my USB ports, not all cases
have front USB ports, or ones you want to use anyway. The driver
CD has just that, nF4 drivers and interestingly, a few utilities.
These include the nF4 utilities -
Cool'n'Quiet
nTune
SmartLAN
and an Award BIOS utility, WinFlash.
The
Utilities CD includes -
Adobe
reader
DPU – Helps to ensure the safety of important data
Pro-Magic Plus – Similar to WinXP system restore
ShowShifter – Turns your PC into a multimedia device
I'm In Touch – Remote control your PC's from anywhere
Media Ring – Make calls over the internet (to people with
the same software)
WinCinema – Includes WinDVD / WinDVD Creator / WinRIP
The
manual supplied with the KN1 SLI is shaped similar to coupon book
and is in full color print, this does assist you in determining
what they are talking about on the motherboard as almost everything
is identified by color. The manual is well done and easy to read
/ follow.
The
motherboard is ECS purple with yellow, blue, red, purple, green
and even white highlights. I would have liked to see a few lesser
colors, although that is not going to deter me from picking
a motherboard, some people require good looks as much as performance,
so they could have an issue with the slew of colors used.
The
socket used on the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme is of course of the 939
format and is located on the right rear quadrant as with most
solutions today. Care must be taken when choosing a HS as there
are several capacitors around the socket retention mechanism,
if your HS protrudes outside of the mechanism, there is some likelihood
that you will hit or bend one of these capacitors.
Above
the socket is a noticeable difference from your average motherboard,
you see a Fan with an air-duct surrounding it to pull air across
the voltage regulation capacitors, as well as some of the heat
pushed out by the CPU HS/Fan. Moving to the left of the socket
is a 4 pin 5v/12v Molex connector (residing awfully close to
PCIe x16 slot 1 mind you) which should be used along with the
standard 24pin power and the 4 pin ‘P4’ power. All
of these power connections are there to aid in stability, especially
when using two PCIe graphics cards. The 4pin P4 sits above and
right of the 939 socket, the 24pin ATX connector sits bottom
right. My only issue here is the Rear I/O cover plate only has
a parallel port cutout for the fan to blow air out of. It should
have been more of a made to fit solution, it does however work.
To
the left of the 24 pin power connector are 2 IDE ports with
a further floppy port situated directly under the 24 pin connector.
Not an ideal position for the floppy port but can not be entirely
omitted from a motherboard, despite it being for a device that
is used less and less as time goes by. Next to the IDE connectors
are 3 Fan power connectors, we can also see the 4 nForce4 SLI
SATA-II headers and the actively cooled MCP. Installing the
Main graphics card you can see the active cooling fan for the
chipset is could be in the way with large graphics cards. Just
to the left of the HS/Fan for the chipset is the 2 SiL3132 SATA-II
headers.
The
PCI/PCIe area has 3 PCI slots at the left of the board, 2 PCIe
Graphics slots and 1 PCIe 1x slot. The 2 graphics slots are
separated by the small 1x PCIe slot. In between the 3 PCI and
1x PCIe slots is a flashing purple light, although I attributed
this to “show” the manual actually states there
is a purpose for these lights; it appears if they are blinking,
then there is nothing installed in the slot. There is no where
in the BIOS the ability to shut these off, so if you hate them,
let’s hope you don't have a window on your case. I take
it as they are looking at this being a troubleshooting mechanism,
to allow you to see if the PCI card was installed properly...
mmmk.
The
Rear I/O Panel for the motherboard features (from left to right)
2 PS2 ports for your mouse and keyboard, RS-232, exhaust fan,
S/PDIF for sound, 4 USB slots, 2 RJ45’s and the 6 connector
Audio panel.
Installing
the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme, like many motherboards, is rarely an
event especially if you happen to have a tech-station as your
test-bed. The chipset fan is located between the PCIe x16 slots
and could cause an issue with double wide video cards. Memory
is inserted from the front most slots (farthest from the CPU)
if you want to run them in DDR mode. To the right of the memory
modules is a LED called “Anti-Burn LED”, this is
to ensure that you do not remove the memory modules until the
light has turned off. Question here, has anyone reading experienced
electrostatic shocking your memory when pulling it out because
a capacitor still had a charge applied to it delivering voltage
to you memory modules? Can't say as I have either, but nonetheless
it is a nice touch. ECS has used the standard nForce4 mounting
bracket for the 939 socket, highlighted in orange. The rear
IO plate fits well, although a few too many tabs for my liking,
even the IO fan has a place for exhausting the hot air. Almost
everything is labeled and/or color coded well, however don't
lose that manual or have another machine with Internet access,
as the front panel connectors are not labeled directly on the
motherboard.
My
initial install I built the system using a Hitachi 80GB SATA Drive.
I do not have a SATA-2 HD, yet, so I am unable to perform testing
in the respect. There are 4 SATA connectors using the nForce4
chipset on this motherboard; these support either 1.5Gb/s or 3.0Gb/s
independently of each other. This allows you to have a mix and
match of SATA and SATA-2 Hard Drives in your system without limiting
the performance of your SATA-2 drives. The nForce4 based SATA
connectors also support Full Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ) and
Native Command Queuing (NCQ). What do these mean to you? In a
motherboard that supports these, there is a definite ability to
see improvement in performance. This of course depends on your
system build and how you as an end user your machine (NCQ increases
performance in multitasking scenario’s mainly). TCQ allows
the IO Host controller to open and close the communication channel
during drive operations, this allows the system to make requests
and receive data from/to other drives in the system. A non TCQ
system will maintain an open channel until a request is fulfilled.
NCQ basically allows for improved reading of a hard drive through
physical mapped reading of data rather then in-line request data
reading, i.e. if data I requested had 4 areas on the hard drive,
1st and 3rd bit on the outer track, 2nd and 4th on the inner track.
NCQ would recognize this and read the 1st and 3rd bit while on
the outer track, then go read the 2nd and 4th on the inner track.
A non NCQ system would go outer track, inner track, outer track,
inner track, not very efficient, especially when seek times are
much greater then read or write times. There are also 2 more SATA
risers using the SiL3132 RAID chipset, the manual states that
these are Generation 2 connectors supporting 3.0Gb/s, it does
not mention 1.5Gb/s support. I would imagine, however, SATA-2
has SATA support built in by default. These connectors also support
NCQ but add eSATA (external SATA) functionality, which requires
a special shielded cable to run the distance needed to get outside
of your case. The eSATA standard also supports hot plugging of
your external hard drives although you will of course need an
OS that also supports hot plugging.
The
IDE, 24 pin Power and Floppy cables plug into the front most section
of the motherboard, you will need support underneath as you are
going to be applying some pressure here when installing the cables.
ECS has interestingly placed 3 fan headers on the front most middle
of the motherboard, it definitely makes them easier to find (not
that this is typically an issue), I have to wonder if there might
be a scenario where they are to far away from a fan on the rear
of the case?
Nothing
truly glares out about the installation of Windows XP Pro with
the possible exception to the nVidia IDE drivers as it relates
to the SATA drive. I used the nVidia nF4 drivers, The XP embedded
MS IDE drivers proved to work flawlessly, if not slower, compared
to their nVidia nF4 counterparts. Neither NIC was found on install,
as well as the sound drivers. When you have a newer system that
is to be expected. Although, I do have to say I was surprised
the Realtek 8100C was not detected as it is an older 10/100
NIC (/me shrugs), such is Windows XP. After all of my testing
was done, and because I am glutton for punishment, I decided
I would see how well Top-Hat works :). Without anyone’s
approval (remember, testing is done) I started to upgrade the
flash from floppy and pulled the power cord half way through...
Like I said, punishment. Of course, the system would not boot,
no matter how many CMOS resets I performed, she was not coming
back. So I plugged on top of the Phoenix BIOS chip good ole
Top-Hat, powered on the system and watched her boot to floppy.
At this point, according to the manual, I am to remove the Top-Hat
chip. Needless to say, I was more nervous about this then losing
my BIOS in the first place; removing live chips is not my favorite
thing to do. I proceeded to flash the BIOS back to what she
should be without issue. Hrmmm, it actually works as stated...
Just a few words here: #1 – Where was this in the nF2
days? #2 – How friggin cool is this?
NEXT
