Product Reviews

ECS's KN1 SLI Extreme (left) is a good choice if you have an AMD processor and you want SLI. If you have an Intel processor, though, Abit's NI8 SLI can help. The board uses nVidia's nForce 4 SLI chipset and has an LGA775 socket. You can run any LGA775 Intel processor including those with a 1,066MHz frontside bus. Using two cards in SLI mode means you lose one PCI-E x1 slot, but this leaves a further PCI-E x1 and two PCI slots free for further expansion.

To keep noise down, Abit has implemented its OTES heat pipe technology, which passively cools the Northbridge. However, the large heat sink, which sits next to the back panel, means there's no

ADVERTISEMENT

room for the audio outputs. Instead, Abit provides these on a riser card, but this is very unstable unless you screw it in.

The -Guru software allows you to overclock and control the fan speeds. It has plenty of predefined profiles including a quiet mode, which lowers performance but drops the noise of the fans to a low hum.

A nice touch is the LED on the motherboard, which gives double-digit error codes. You can look these up in the manual and troubleshoot pre-Windows hardware faults more easily than with the usual BIOS beeps.

Installation was problematic for this board. After loading Windows XP's Service Pack 2 (SP2) we installed the nVidia chipset drivers, which stopped our optical drive from working. In the end we had to remove SP2, reinstall the nVidia drivers and reapply the service pack.

We tested the system using a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processor and 1GB of RAM installed in a dual-channel memory configuration. It returned a score of 133 in the Shopper application benchmarks and 5,449 in PCMark04. This was just behind Gigabyte's GA-8N SLI Royal motherboard, reviewed in Shopper July 2005. There's little to choose between the two boards and, as they're both around the same price, either makes a good buy.