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Introduction
Oddly enough, it has been a while here at Neoseeker since we last reviewed an Athlon 64 motherboard. Recent industry excitement is all over NVIDIA's nForce 4 for Intel chipsets, while the AMD camp has been quiet. Since the inception of DFI's LanParty NF4 series, there has been relatively little to get excited about in the AMD motherboard arena. All of that is in for a possible change.
Two to three weeks ago, we received word from Elitegroup (better known as ECS) that they were very interested in sending us a review sample of their newly-released premium nForce 4 motherboard -- the KN1 Extreme. Being a hardware review shop that deals primarily with enthusiast- and high-end parts, we were genuinely surprised that ECS had something in store that could potentially uproot people's perceptions of the company.
There is more to ECS than most people are aware of. For instance, they share research and development with PC Chips, as well as being a designer and manufacturer of parts for many other smaller companies incapable of performing these complex and costly tasks on their own. Soyo, for instance, employs ECS to design and build motherboards to their specifications. Up until now, ECS has been largely absent from the minds of the enthusiasts, probably due to the fact that their target market was always the low-cost/low-end segment. If you have been over at ECS' website in recent months, you'll see that the company has made quite a turn-around, and are now trying to snag some of that lucrative enthusiast market share.
The fruits of this turn-around are products such as today's KN1 Extreme -- a highly-spec'ed and feature-filled nForce 4 Socket 939 motherboard, intended to provide an alternative to the established enthusiast Socket 939 motherboards. I'm eager to see what ECS has up their sleeve, so let's get started.
Specifications
A raw specification sheet, as presented on ECS' website:
| CPU | Socket 939 for AMD Athlon 64/Athlon 64 FX processor High-performance Hyper Transport CPU interface Support transfer rate of 2000/1600/1200/800/400 MTs per second |
|---|---|
| Chipset | NVIDIA nForce 4 Ultra (single chip) |
| Memory | Dual-channel DDR memory architecture 4x 184-pin DDR SDRAM slots (max. of 4 GB) Supports DDR400/333/266/200 memory |
| Expansion Slots | 1x PCI Express x16 slot 2x PCI Express x1 slots 3x PCI slots |
| Storage | Supported by nForce 4 Ultra:
|
| Audio | Realtek ALC655 6-Channel audio codec Compliant with AC'97 2.3 specification |
| IEEE 1394a | TI TSB43AB22A controller, supporting 2x IEEE1394a ports |
| Dual LAN | Realtek RTL8100C 10/100 LAN controller Marvell 88E1111 GigaLAN PHY |
| Rear Panel I/O | 1x PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse connectors 4x USB 2.0 ports 2x RJ45 LAN connectors 2x digital S/PDIF (optical + coax) out 1x serial port (COM1) 3x audio port (line-in, line-out, min-in) |
| Internal I/O Connectors | 1x 24-pin ATX power supply connector 1x 4-pin ATX +12V connector 1x FDD connector (supporting 360 KB ~ 2.88 MB FDDs) 3x IDE connectors 6x Serial ATA connectors 1x SMBus header 1x LPT1 header 1x IrDA for SIR header 2x 1394a headers 3x USB 2.0 headers supporting an additional 6 USB 2.0 ports 1x front panel switch/LED header 1x front panel audio header 1x CD-in header 4x fan headers (CPUFAN, NB_FAN1, CASFAN1, CASFAN2) |
| System BIOS | Award BIOS with 4 Mb Flash ROM Supports Plug and Play 1.0A, APM 1.2, Multi Boot, DMI Supports ACPI revision 1.0B specification |
| Form Factor | ATX size, 305 mm x 244 mm |
Let's get this straight ... 6 IDE devices, 6 SATA devices, 10 USB 2.0 ports, and a total of 6 expansion slots. ECS has completely outdone all but the craziest of motherboard manufacturers. One of our Gigabyte boards had 8 SATA ports, but I never seen 6 SATA ports along with 3 IDE ports. Top that off with 10 USB 2.0 ports, and you have room for major, major expandability.
But that's not all, folks. Let's take a look at ECS' bundle, and what kind of goods the actual board has in store for us.