Related Articles

Impressions

In a curious marketing strategy, ECS on the packaging seem to have rebranded Nvidia's SLI as their own "Scalable D.G.E.", or in other words, Dual Graphics Engines. This is a clever, if slightly bizarre way of touting SLI's performance gains as something ECS pioneered. Not true. The shaky english on all of the packaging is also not good if ECS are expecting gamers to take them seriously. What really matters is what's inside the box though.

The box comes packaged in a more-than-needed amount of carboard, and contains not only the board, but an extra box full of goodies, a la the original KN1. The white box includes Six Serial ATA Cables, Molex to Serial ATA Power Cable, Network Cable, Parallel Expansion Bracket, Ultra/133 IDE Cable, Ultra/33 IDE Cable, Floppy Cable, USB/IEEE 1394 Bracket, Front Panel I/O Bracket, Dual BIOS chip, I/O Shield, and Case Screws.

The package is definitely well rounded and almost all of the accessories are highly useful. The most useful of these is ECS' "Top-hat" BIOS chip. While having a slightly goofy name, its usefulness far outweighs any caught-in-translation misnomer as it allows you to completely replace the original BIOS if something breaks, or you break it. This goes beyond simply resetting the CMOS, and makes a full BIOS replacement completely painless. We tested the feature with no problems whatsoever.

Board Layout

For the most part, there are no issues with the way the board is set up. Almost everything is nicely tucked in, with the major exception being the (optional) green air duct at the top rear of the board. This duct sucks away hot air from the CPU to the outside of the case. This is not a bad a idea, but will interfere with larger cooling options from companies such as Zalman.

The only other gripes we have with the board's layout are the placement of the RAM slots and the placement of the 4 pin 12 Volt connector. The RAM tabs, when a video card is installed, are trapped underneath the boards PCB. This means that moving out system memory requires you to first remove the video card from its place. This is both annoying and unnecessary as many of the other NF4 motherboard makers place the RAM slots at the top of the board above the CPU.

As far as things being above the CPU, one of the things that should not be hidden above and behind the CPU area is the motherboards auxiliary power connector. In the case of the KN1 SLI, the connector is in the worst possible spot and will surely cause nightmares for anyone with a case where the power supply is mounted abnormally.