Features cont’d

Storage and USB

While NVIDIA’s nForce4 chipset natively supports up to four Serial ATA drives, ECS decided this wasn’t enough, adding support for two additional Serial ATA drives for a total of six drives. This provides a wealth of storage connectivity for enthusiasts, and probably comes as welcome news to those of you who are into video recording or MP3s. SiS’ popular 180 Serial ATA controller is used to power the additional two ports and also adds a third IDE connection.

On the USB front, ECS ships the KN1 Extreme with support for up to six USB devices, four on the board’s backplate, and two via an external USB header. ECS also includes an adapter kit for plugging the USB header into a 3.5” drive bay on the front of your case, the header also includes IEEE-1394 ports (both mini and full-size) which is powered by a Texas Instruments controller.

Third IDE connector

6 Serial ATA ports and SiS180

nTune

For overclocking and hardware monitoring functionality, ECS bundles the KN1 Extreme with NVIDIA’s incredibly powerful (and versatile) nTune utility. nTune is a really cool software utility package, providing settings for overclocking your processor within Windows, and if you have a GeForce FX card or greater installed, you can even use nTune to overclock your graphics card without having to rely on a third-party software utility, or the Coolbits registry hack. As its name implies, nTune can automatically tune your system for a wide range of parameters, such as best disk, graphics, or memory performance, or you can tweak nTune to run your PC more quietly. (Although at the time of this writing, the KN1 Extreme didn’t support this feature properly with nTune.)

Tweaking bus speeds with nTune

Hardware monitoring

You can use nTune to optimize performance

802.11g

If all that weren’t enough, the real icing on the cake that ECS provides with the KN1 Extreme is an 802.11g WiFi adapter; specifically, an external USB 2.0-based solution.

Included in the box is a black 802.11g USB 2.0 controller, and a stylish black cradle. The 802.11g controller is a little larger than a USB thumb drive. ECS would prefer users use the bundled cradle with the 802.11g device, but if you’d like you can plug it straight into your PC’s USB port without any problems.

The beauty of providing an external 802.11g solution is that it can be easily hooked up to any PC you have access to, whether at home, a friend’s house, or at work. Say for instance you have an old laptop you’d like to hook up to your existing wireless network. With the ECS device, you simply plug it into your laptop, install the driver from the bundled CD, and you’re done! Other manufacturers have provided WiFi connectivity as well, but in the case of ASUS it’s a proprietary connection that will only work with certain ASUS motherboards, while Gigabyte’s solution was PCI based, requiring you to open up your PC and making it incompatible with laptops, which are the most popular systems for use with WiFi.

System info

Adjusting voltages

802.11g WiFi

To top it all off, ECS even ships the board with a 3-foot long CAT5 network cable.