Overclocking and Thoughts

Overclocking

Working within the constraints of the BIOS options available on the KN1 Extreme produced some pretty decent results. Without the ability to manually alter the multiplier for the CPU available, CPU frequency could still be pushed to the maximum allowed in the BIOS of 250MHz, which ran perfectly stably using a HTT multiplier of 5x provided CPU voltage was raised +150mV. It seems obvious from the results obtained that the multiplier was indeed reduced somehow, although this was certainly not done through the BIOS or software by ourselves.

At these settings, a default 3DMark 2001 run produced a score of 24,523 - An increase of close to 1,000 points. I also did some testing using our RealStorm benchmark, and produced a final result at this setup of 68.84, an increase of a couple of frames per second over the 66.06 produced at stock speeds. Testing with Prime95 for a couple of hours confirmed that this overclock was indeed stable. Not bad results at all, but you can't help but feel that even more could have been squeezed out of the system with a slightly wider range of options in the BIOS and the ability to lower the CPU multiplier through the BIOS.

Thoughts

It's difficult not to be impressed when you look at an nForce4-based motherboard - Simply the basic feature set is enough to put a smile on all but the most hardened of faces. You name it, nForce4 has it - Serial ATA or USB ports aplenty, full hardware firewall, dual LAN adapters, PCI Express support, and so on. The fact that ECS have added an extra couple of Serial ATA ports and thrown in a USB wireless network adapter (and a 802.11g compliant one no less) only adds to the completeness of the bundle. That all of this comes at an RRP of just ?4 including VAT makes it taste all the sweeter.

Performance wise, the KN1 Extreme is good without being stellar, finding itself unable to match a board equipped with the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset, but still often finding itself ahead of its nForce3 250Gb predecessor. It would be hard to imagine anyone being particularly disappointed with its performance, that's for sure. For the overclockers among you however, the KN1 Extreme is not such a good proposition. The BIOS options available almost all offer a comprehensive range of values, but the ommission of CPU multipliers is a large one, and coupled with only a relatively small 50MHz range for the CPU frequency, there's only so much you can do to squeeze extra performance from your rig.

So, if you want to taste the goodness of NVIDIA's latest chipset in its Ultra incarnation and aren't worried about the overclocking side of things, what you have here is a solid, stable, fully featured setup, and all at an extremely tempting price point to boot. The overclockers among us will want to wait however, either for future BIOS updates for this board or to look elsewhere.

Pros

Impressive price
Good layout
Fantastic feature set
Bundled wireless adapter

Cons

Lacking in the BIOS department for overclockers

Thanks

ECS for the sample

HEXUS.right2reply

Commenting under our HEXUS.right2reply initiative, ECS' Managing Director, Mr. Joseph Chang, has this to say about our review:

ECS ELITEGROUP Computer Systems would like to thank We for the feedback provided from the professional and thorough review of the KN1 Extreme our latest flagship motherboard.

As a result of this we have amended the BIOS (v1.0C) to address the weaknesses shown by the review. This includes the addition of the ?Hammer FID Control?allowing adjustment of the CPU multiplier to provide more control for over-clocking the system.

With this modification and all the other benefits that has already highlighted, this has now made it even better value and a strong contender for the gaming market.

Over the past year ECS has been working hard to improve its image within the market by listening to our customers and by producing high quality components while maintaining competitive pricing. As part of this we include a 3 years RTB warranty for all our Extreme range motherboards mirroring our confidence in the quality of these products.

Sure enough, also provided to us was a screenshot taken using v1.0C of the BIOS for this motherboard, depicting the formerly missing ability to control the multiplier, as you can see below.

We now have a copy of this BIOS revision ourselves, and will be checking out this additional functionality in due course. Seeing as the missing multiplier control was the one big downside of the board previously, its addition is more than welcome, and makes the KN1 Extreme an even more exciting prospect for anyone after an nForce4 Ultra board.



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