Product Reviews

ECS's PN1 SLI2 motherboard uses Nvidia's top-of-the-range Nforce 590 SLI chipset. It's also the Intel equivalent of the company's excellent AMD-based KN3 SLI2 motherboard, reviewed above. It's the first Nvidia-based motherboard we've reviewed to support Intel's Core 2 Duo range of processors.

The board's range of features is similar to those found on the AMD motherboard. There's support for Nvidia's DualNet, so you can combine the two Gigabit Ethernet ports into one pipe, and Max Overclocking, so you can overclock your processor and memory. As with the AMD motherboard, ECS's Top-Hat Flash lets you recover

The PN1 SLI2 has plenty of room for expansion. In addition to the dual PCI-E x16 slots, which run at full speed, there are two PCI slots, two PCI-E x1 and one PCI-E x4 slots. The motherboard's back panel is very busy, with four USB2, dual Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio outputs. More interesting is the FireWire 800 port, which you can use with external hard disks to get really fast throughputs. This is the first motherboard we've seen to use one. There's no eSATA port, but ECS provides an adaptor in the box that screws into a blanking plate slot on your case and converts one of the six SATA2 ports into an eSATA connection. The box also contains extra USB2 and FireWire ports to connect to the spare headers.

Performance from our 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processor was very good. The PN1 SLI2 is one of the best-performing Intel motherboards we've seen. It's a little more expensive than the AMD equivalent, but a lot of extras are included in the box. If you're after a fast-performing Intel motherboard that has SLI support, the PN1 SLI2 from ECS is well worth the money.