Specification and Accessories

Arriving to our test labs the ECS KN1 Extreme amazed us with its impressive looks and gorgeous accessories. We’ll talk about the latter shortly, but now take a look at the product:

The original purple color of the PCB, the special cooling system for the CPU power circuitry, the massive heatsink on the chipset, the use of different colors for the slots and connectors and the stylish metal plate with the Extreme series logo are all very imposing at first sight. We didn’t really like the numerous incomprehensible promo labels like “Dual Channel DDR 999 DIMM? but that’s a matter of taste, I believe. On the whole, this mainboard is going to be a stunning sight in a transparent system case. Let’s put our emotions aside, however, and take a sober look at the specification of this product:

As you see, the capabilities of the nForce4 Ultra chipset are complemented with two additional controllers on the ECS KN1 Extreme: a RAID controller from SiS and a FireWire controller from Texas Instruments. These chips aren’t optional, so all samples of the ECS KN1 Extreme should have exactly the same functionality as listed in the table above.

We were very much pleased with the accessories we received with the ECS KN1 Extreme. Few manufacturers enclose so many items into the package. We found the following in the box:

• Three CDs with a software bundle, drivers and utilities;
• Six Serial ATA cables;
• Power cable for two Serial ATA hard disk drives;
• One 80-pin Parallel ATA cable and a black FDD cable;
• Bracket for the back panel of the system case with one parallel (LPT) port;
• Bracket for the back panel of the system case with two High-Speed USB ports and two FireWire ports (6-pin and 4-pin);
• Bracket for the 3.5?bay of the system case to move two High-Speed USB and two FireWire ports from the back-panel bracket to the front panel;
• I/O shield for the back of the system case;
• Two-meter-long Ethernet cable;
• Extension cord with cradle for one USB port;
• USB WLAN dongle with support of the 802.11g protocol;
• User manual.

No doubt, that’s a generous gift any mainboard maker would be proud to give to the user. Yet we want to warn you that some things from this list are “optional? quoting the manual on the mainboard. The basic accessories may not include the USB extension cord, Wi-Fi controller, LPT bracket, and four (of the six) Serial ATA cables. On the other hand, making these accessories optional helped to reduce the price of the mainboard even more.