Motherboards: ECS KN1 SLI Lite and MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum
CPU: AMD Athlon X2 3800+ Dual-Core
Memory: 2GB Corsair TWINX (2x1GB) DDR RAM
CPU Heatsink: AMD stock
Video card: EVGA 7900GT with 93.71 driver version
Hard drive: Western Digital 250GB SATA2 16MB cache
Power supply: Antec NEO 480w
Case: Cooler Master Centurion 5
BIOS Settings
The BIOS is an Award BIOS with 4Mb Flash ROM. Within the BIOS are a standard set of screens available for setting up the KN1 SLI Lite motherboard. There is nothing extraordinary about the BIOS options available, but the KN1 SLI Lite BIOS does at least allow you to make the minimum number of changes necessary to overclock the CPU, HTT and RAM in your PC. The screens available in the BIOS include:
Standard CMOS: Time, Date, HD and CD-ROM selection, etc.
Advanced BIOS: First Boot Priority, Cache enable/disable, etc.
Advanced Chipset Features: CPU Frequency, HT Frequency, HT Width, DRAM configuration, etc. Within the DRAM configuration sub-menu, there are choices available for setting the memory speed and the CAS latency.
Inegrated Peripherals: RAID setup, onboard audio setup, etc.
Power Management: AMD Cool - n Quiet enable/disable, HDD and Display power-down settings, etc.
PnP/PCI Configuration: PCI and IRQ settings, etc.
CPU Socket 939
Chipset fan and SATA ports
ECS KN1 SLI Lite in the case
Performance Tests
With such a reasonable price tag, the expectations for performance of the KN1 SLI Lite cannot be too high. It would be unreasonable to expect this motherboard to complete with the $150+ flagship SLI motherboards from other vendors - although at least middle-of-the-road performance should be expected. It is also important to note that the overall performance difference in most nForce4 SLI chipset motherboards is typically very small (usually plus or minus 3 or 4 percentage points) when using the same hardware components. This means that price, as well as features such as SATA 2, dual-core CPU support, etc,. are really the differentiating factors from one nForce4 SLI board to another.
Rather than reporting the actual test scores, which will vary greatly based on the CPU, RAM and video card you use, the below graphs show the percentage difference in performance between the ECS KL1 SLI Lite and the MSI K8N Neo4-F. Both motherboards are based on the nForce4 chipset. For the Quake 4 and Doom 3 measurements, we used a test demo and ran it four times. The first result was not used, and the average of the last three results was used to calculate the final score.
The test results show that the ECS provides slightly higher performance of between 3/4 of a percent to 2 percent. This marginal difference is not significant - the conclusion we can come to simply shows that the ECS provides roughly equivalent performance to the MSI motherboard using the same chipset.
Throughout the testing the KN1 SLI Lite was solid and reliable, with no system crashes or system hangs. A reliable motherboard is a must for every PC, and the KN1 SLI Lite does not disappoint in this respect.
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