ECS KN1 SLI Lite Motherboard

Despite the emergence of newer and more powerful processors, such as the Core 2 Duo and Quad core CPUs, there is still a very large market base of existing AMD Athlon, AMD Athlon X2 and AMD Athlon FX socket 939 processors. Based on the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset, the ECS KN1 SLI Lite (v1.0A) motherboard falls squarely in line with this existing mid-range market segment. Considering the fact that very few of the games available today are capable of taking advantage of dual-core or quad-core processors, there are still a lot of people not quite ready to upgrade their processor to either an AMD socket AM2 or Intel socket 775 motherboard. For those people looking to upgrade to a new budget SLI motherboard based on a socket 939 processor, the ECS KN1 SLI Lite offers a lot of value for the money.

Look and Feel

The ECS KN1 SLI Lite is a scaled back version of the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme. Both motherboards are socket 939 and based on the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset. Along with a lower price tag, the KN1 SLI Lite doesn't offer quite as many bells and as the higher priced KN1 SLI Extreme. But, for most people who are not looking to spend the extra money for features they most likely won't use anyway, this motherboard still provides a lot of attractive features. With support for dual-core CPUs, SATA 2, SLI, 8-channel audio, and Giga LAN --- the feature list of this mid-range motherboard is more than adequate for most gamers.

The first thing you'll notice about the ECS KN1 SLI Lite motherboard is the purple color. This grape color may be distracting to some, but it does make the written labels for the various connectors very easy to read. It also features an active cooling fan next to the SATA connections, which provides some extra airflow to keep internal components cool.

As you'll see from the pictures below, the motherboard also has 4 memory slots for up to 4GB of DDR400/333/266 SDRAM. There are two purple slots and two yellow slots, which are designed so that you can easily set up the dual-channel memory configuration by using slots of the same color. In addition, the on-board audio features eight channels (7.1 format) and uses the Realtek ALC650 codec, which has a signal-to-noise ratio of 100 dB.

Features

• Socket 939 with support for AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core, Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 CPUs
• nVidia nForce4 SLI Chipset
• Storage: 4 x Serial ATA2 devices, 4 x Ultra DMA133/100/66 devices, RAID0, RAID1& RAID 0+1 configuration
• Memory: 4 x184-pin DDR SDRAM DIMM socket support up to 4 GB of DDR400/333/226 RAM
• Expansion slots: 2 x PCI Express slots (SLI mode: x8+x8, single PCI-E is x8 mode) 1 x PCI Express x1 slot , 3 x PCI slots
• Audio: Onboard Realtek ALC850 codec (codec (eight channels, 16-bit resolution, 100 dB signal-to-noise ratio)
• Network: Onboard Giga LAN
• USB 2.0 and Firewire (1394) support
  
  
  

ECS KN1 SLI Lite Box	Included accessories	Top view of ECS KN1 SLI Lite

Out of the Box Setup

To get the KN1 SLI Lite up and running is a fairly straightforward process. All of the necessary screws and brackets are included with the motherboard, as well as a CD with drivers and a CD with software utilities. As I removed my old motherboard and installed the KN1 SLI Lite, a few points stuck out to me as noteworthy:

• Installation of the RAM was easy enough if you haven't installed your video card first, but removal of the video card would be necessary if you were replacing RAM once it was already installed. This is especially true as the size (both length and width) continues to increase with the release of more powerful video cards. It would be nice if the RAM slots weren't covered up by a long video card.
• In the PCI-E video card slots, the actual speed is x8 instead of the full x16 normally found in PCI-E motherboards that are SLI equipped. While this isn't a real big issue with the video cards of today, the future PCI-E video cards will most certainly saturate the x8 speed and need the full transfer capability of x16 slots.
• The layout of the pins for connecting the front panel power, reset and HDD LED was confusing. I had to refer to the user manual to find the correct layout for these front panel case connections, which caused the installation to be a bit longer than I would have liked it to be.