Product Reviews

The KN3 SLI2 is ECS's first AMD Socket AM2 motherboard to use Nvidia's Nforce 590 SLI chipset; the Intel version of this motherboard is also reviewed below. The 590 is Nvidia's top-of-the range chipset and supports DualNet, for combining the two Gigabit Ethernet ports into one fast pipe, and Max Overclocking BIOS controls so you can adjust your processor and memory speeds. ECS provides the board with its Top-Hat Flash chip, which lets you recover your BIOS if you've pushed your overclocking too far.

As the high-end SLI chipset, both PCI-E x16 slots run at the full x16 speed; the cheaper 570 chipset runs the slots at x8 speed when using two graphics cards. In between the

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two graphics card slots are two PCI-E x1 slots, which will be blocked if you install two graphics cards. Fortunately, there are two PCI slots and four USB2 ports. There's no FireWire, but ECS provides these ports on a blanking plate so you can use the motherboard headers. The motherboard supports all AMD's Socket AM2 processors. It has four DDR2 memory slots that can take DDR2-800MHz memory. They're colour coded, so it's easy to use both memory channels for better performance.

Building a PC using this motherboard is generally easy, but the 24-pin ATX connector sits directly in front of the first IDE connector, so connecting an optical drive can be a bit fiddly. The KN3 SLI2 has two fans on the board, one hidden behind ECS's trademark luminous green shield. Fortunately, they're not too loud and just add to the background noise of a typical PC. There's plenty of room for storage, with six SATA 300 ports. There's also an external SATA connector for a high-speed connection to an external hard disk.

Performance was excellent using an Athlon 64 FX-62 processor and 1GB of DDR2 800MHz memory. Its score was 14 points higher than Foxconn's WinFast N570SM2AA Nforce 570-based motherboard. Considering its low price, the KN3 SLI2 is a bargain AM2 SLI motherboard.