Introduction

I would like to thank ECS for supplying the tested motherboard.

At this year's Computex in Taiwan, ECS announced the big brother of the successful KN1 Extreme Motherboard - the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme. It is based on NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI chipset and aims at delivering an affordable SLI motherboard, while still having features like Dual Ethernet and IEEE1394.

In order to increase cooling performance, ECS has added a small thermal exhaust fan to the back panel. Another handy feature in cases where your BIOS gets corrupted, is the inclusion of the top-hat flash, a small device with an extra BIOS chip on it which you snap onto the existing chip on the motherboard.



Not only does the chipset support PCI-Express and SLI, it also has four SATA-II capable ports with RAID 0/1/0+1 support. Also integrated is a native Gigabit Ethernet controller which can be used with NVIDIA's own firewall solution and ten USB 2.0 ports. On top of that, ECS added another 10/100 MBit Ethernet interface and two more SATA-II ports.

Features

Specifications from Elitegroup

CPU

• Socket 939 for AMD Athlon 64/Athlon 64 FX CPU
• High-performance HyperTransport CPU Interface
• Transfer rate of 2000/1600/1200/800/400 MT/s

Chipset

• NVIDIA nForce4 SLI media and communications processor (MCP)

Memory

• Dual-channel DDR memory architecture
• 4 x 184-pin, 2.5V, DDR SDRAM DIMM sockets support up to 4 GB
• Support DDR400/333/266/200 unbuffered DDR SDRAM

Expansion Slots

• 2 x PCI Express x16 slot
• 1 x PCI Express x1 slots
• 3 x PCI slots

Storage

• Supported by nForce4 SLI
  - Operate at Gen1i (1.5Gb/s) or Gen2i (3.0Gb/s) mode
  - 4 x SATA II Gen 1 or Gen 2 devices
  - RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 configuration
• Supported by SiI3132
  - Serial ATA Generation 2 transfer rate of 3.0 Gb/s
  - 2 x SATA II devices
  - RAID 0 and RAID 1 configuration

IEEE1394A

• TI TSB43AB22A IEEE1394a controller
• Supports 2 x IEEE1394a cable ports at 100M bits/s, 200M bits/s, and 400M bits/s

Audio

• Realtek ALC850 8-channel audio CODEC
• Compliant with AC'97 2.3 specification

Dual LAN

• Realtek RTL8100C 10/100 Mbps LAN controller
• Marvell 88E1111 Giga LAN PHY

Rear Panel I/O

• 1 x PS/2 keyboard
• 1 x PS/2 mouse connector
• 4 x USB ports
• 2 x RJ45 LAN connectors
• 1 x Serial port (COM1)
• 2 x Digital SPDIF (Optical & Coaxial) out
• 1 x Audio jack (Line-in, Line-out, and Mic-in ports)

BIOS Features

• Award BIOS with 4Mb Flash ROM
• Supports Plug and Play 1.0A, APM 1.2, Multi Boot, DMI
• Supports ACPI revision 1.0B specificaion

Internal I/O

• 1 x 24-pin ATX Power Supply Connector & 4-pin 12V Connector
• 1 x 4-pin ATX4P1 power connector
• 1 x Floppy connector- supports 360K ~ 2.88M Bytes, 3 Mode FDDs or LS120
• 2 x IDE connectors
• 6 x Serial ATA connectors
• 3 x USB 2.0 headers support additional 6 USB ports
• 2 x 1394a headers
• 1 x LPT1 header
• 1 x Front panel switch/LED header
• 1 x Front panel audio header
• 1 x Infrared header
• 1 x SPK1 header
• 1 x CD-in header
• CPUFAN1/NBFAN1/CASFAN1~3 connectors

Form Factor

• ATX size
• 305mm x 244mm