Introduction

Every once in awhile a product comes along that completely blows us away. These products typically come out of nowhere, offering new levels of performance that were previously unheard of, or perhaps delivering a new level of performance at a given price point. ATI’s RADEON 9700 PRO was the most recent example of such a product.

When it was first launched, the RADEON 9700 PRO shattered all previous performance barriers, and was the first graphics card to support Microsoft’s DirectX 9.0 API, despite the fact that DX9 hadn’t been released yet. If you recall, up to that point ATI had established a track record for following months behind NVIDIA, who was first to deliver DX7 cards en masse with their GeForce 256 GPU, and DX8 with GeForce 3. For the DX9 generation, NVIDIA trailed ATI by over six months, and their first DX9 product, GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, was slower, louder, and ran hotter than RADEON 9700 PRO, ultimately the product never entered full production.

On the motherboard front, one of the last boards to truly stun us was ECS’ K7S5A. That’s right, we said ECS!

This definitely does not look like a value board

The ECS KN1 Extreme board

Purple PCB

The K7S5A was the first motherboard to hit the market that was based on SiS’ 735 chipset. If you recall, back in those days, AMD had just released the world’s first DDR chipset for the Athlon platform, AMD-760. AMD’s 760 chipset was a very solid offering, delivering good performance, a well-rounded feature set, and most importantly, superb stability. The only problem with AMD-760 was price and availability. AMD was not in the business to make chipsets, and has always preferred relying on chipset partners, they just couldn’t supply enough chipsets to satisfy the market, which ultimately led to higher prices for the few AMD-760 boards that actually were available on the market.

VIA’s counterpart to AMD-760, KT266, was plagued early on with problems. Performance wasn’t up to snuff, with KT266 boards falling significantly behind AMD-760 in performance. In addition, VIA was still suffering from nagging compatibility issues with KT266’s South Bridge chip, 686B. There were numerous users who were running into PCI problems with 686B, the most notorious being Creative Sound Blaster Live! owners. Others reported USB problems, specifically dealing with printers and scanners.

In comparison, all SiS735 did was work, and work brilliantly. Not only did the chipset offer superior stability, it also wasn’t plagued by the compatibility issues found with VIA KT266, and even provided performance that was superior to AMD-760.

Extreme logo

Nifty coloring huh?

ECS’ K7S5A flourished with SiS735. Not only did the motherboard boast a good feature set, it delivered excellent performance and stability, and incredibly enough, could be found online selling for under $70! In our K7S5A review we said: “Essentially with the K7S5A you get a clean, no-frills board that leaves little guesswork in setting up the system for optimal performance. And once everything is finally set up, you've got a very quick motherboard right out of the box. In that sense the K7S5A reminds us of one of those sleeper cars you occasionally see on the highway. Sure, it may not look very fast on the outside, but you don't want to mess with it at the next stoplight, because before you know it, you're left in its dust.” The only downside to the K7S5A was overclocking options, as the board didn’t have many initially, but follow-up board revisions corrected this problem.

Since then we’d estimate that ECS has gone on to sell hundreds of thousands, if not millions of K7S5A motherboards. Looking over their site, they have 1.x and 3.x revisions, as well as a “Pro” variant. Price Watch even lists a K7S5A board for $40.

ECS’ KN1 Extreme builds on the same formula that made the K7S5A so special, building a board that’s designed for the hardcore gaming crowd. Of course, you probably realized that the moment you saw the motherboard’s twin cooling fans. But that’s definitely not the only feature this motherboard supports…