Board analysis

In order to bring their board to market more quickly, ECS doesn’t stray far from NVIDIA’s reference design for the nForce4 Ultra. As you can see, placement for most of the board’s major components is largely the same as the nForce4 Ultra reference board.

The most striking visual aspect of the KN1 Extreme is its purple PCB, clearly denoting the board’s enthusiast roots. For the most part, everything on the board is color-coded, making installation of components easier for novices and inexperienced computer builders. We’re not just talking keyboard/mouse and audio ports either, as ECS color codes headers for the USB and Firewire headers, as well as the DIMM sockets, which are color coded properly for dual-channel memory operation and the pins for the front panel of your case. The yellow PCI slot is ECS’ PCI Extreme slot. This slot is specially designed to deliver the cleanest signals, making it ideal for use with your PCI-based sound card.

ECS board compared to reference NVIDIA board

USB and FireWire headers

Color-coded DIMM sockets

The KN1 Extreme board has other features you’d expect from an enthusiast-level board. For example, a large handle sits atop all of the board’s jumpers (such as the clear CMOS jumper), making the jumper much easier to grab, especially if you have large fingers. The KN1 Extreme also has rounded corners, ensuring better strength and preventing the board from snagging during installation.

LEDs

ECS includes a ton of assorted LEDs on the KN1 Extreme, nearly enough to direct traffic. A small orange LED sits on the top right corner of the board; ECS calls this their anti-burn LED. It warns you if your memory is installed incorrectly by lighting up. ECS also has their Dr. LED technology, this refers to the blue LEDs that dot the middle of the board, each blue LED denotes a PCI Express or PCI slot for a total of 5 LEDs. The LEDs blink if the accompanying PCI or PCI-E slot is unpopulated or if it’s not functioning properly. If the LED remains on, this means that the slot is populated with an expansion card and running properly. This could potentially be a distraction with some of the LEDs constantly blinking, a handy troubleshooting device, or a cool “bling” feature, depending on how you look at it. Surprisingly enough however, with all the LEDs included, ECS forgot to provide a power LED, which could come in handy for diagnosing a dead motherboard. How’s that for irony? A diagnostic LED panel wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Lots of color coding actually

Nice jumper

ECS provides two PCI Express x1 slots at the middle of the board, directly above the x16 slot for your graphics card. Below the x16 slot are three PCI slots, which should be enough considering that LAN and Firewire functionality is provided onboard, as well as external 802.11g WiFi and six onboard Serial ATA ports. As far as the board’s layout is concerned, overall there really aren’t any gotchas that we could complain about; ECS places the ATX power connector away from the CPU socket, while the ATX 12V connector is tucked behind the keyboard/mouse port, generally out of the way of the processor and directly beneath the system’s power supply. So we really can’t complain there either. It would be nice however if the third IDE connector wasn’t placed along the bottom edge of the board, but that is a popular location for many motherboard manufacturers.

See the LEDs above each PCI slot?

Anti-Burn LED for memory

Another shot of the LEDs including PCI-E LEDs

Cooling

Cooling is one area where the KN1 Extreme really stands apart from many of its competitors, as ECS has gone out of their way to ensure that this board and the CPU runs as cool as possible.

Active cooling on nForce4 chip

This is the duct for the auxiliary fan, hot air exits here

The most striking example of this is the fluorescent green plastic duct flanking the CPU. Like ABIT’s popular “MAX” line, this ducting system serves two purposes: cooling the VRM circuitry near the system processor, and removing the hot, stagnant air near the processor from within your system and blowing it outside the back of your case ultimately helping to serve a third purpose – cooling the system processor.

The second cooler ECS has integrated on the KN1 Extreme is a large, Orb-shaped aluminum cooler. The heatsink is quite tall, with long fins, while the fan rests comfortably inside.

Here you can see the fan from the interior angle

In operation, this system is quite effective, as the nForce4 chip and Athlon 64 4000+ ran quite cool over the course of our testing. The one downside to ECS’ implementation however is noise, both fans spin at high RPMs (5,800 RPMs for the North Bridge fan and 6,200 RPMs for the fan near the CPU) which currently can’t be adjusted within BIOS or via NVIDIA’s nTune software. This is the loudest motherboard we’ve tested in recent years, although we wouldn’t rate the board as excessively loud.