We performed our usual overclocking experiments with the ECS KN1 Extreme. We took an Athlon 64 3800+ processor (2.4GHz frequency) and reduced its multiplier to 8x. For our overclocking not to be limited by the capabilities of the memory modules, we had dropped the memory frequency down to what the memory was guaranteed to support. Thus we can see at which frequencies of the clock generator the ECS KN1 Extreme mainboard remains stable.

Almost the first thing we learned was that the ECS KN1 Extreme wouldn’t start up if more than 222MHz is selected in the BIOS Setup as the frequency of the clock generator. We tried to change the HyperTransport multiplier, to tweak the memory controller parameters, to adjust the voltages, but nothing helped us overcome this barrier.

We were not very surprised, though. We have already seen a mainboard behave like that in our Chaintech VNF4 Ultra VE Review. Chaintech’s engineers solved this problem in the next BIOS update, and we hope ECS will do the same. So we continued to explore the overclockability of the ECS KN1 Extreme in the operating system.

Once again we used the ClockGen utility that allows changing the frequency of the clock generator on any nForce4 Ultra-based mainboard. This program helped us reveal the true overclocking potential of the ECS KN1 Extreme which proved to be much higher than when we had been doing our overclocking from the BIOS Setup.

At x5 HyperTransport multiplier we reached 260MHz clock-generator frequency with the help of ClockGen. This is a kind of record since we haven’t climbed above 250MHz with this HyperTransport multiplier on any other nForce4-based mainboard.

Then, we achieved 295MHz clock-generator frequency with the HyperTransport multiplier set to x4 and 316MHz with the HT multiplier set to x3.

The following table lists our successes when overclocking the ECS KN1 Extreme from the OS:

It is really a pity that it’s impossible to get the same results from the BIOS Setup, but we hope this problem will be solved in the future BIOS updates.

The ECS KN1 Extreme’s hardware monitoring tools allow keeping track of two temperatures, four fan rotation speeds, and eight voltages. Cool’n’Quiet technology is fully supported. The mainboard, however, has no means to control the speed of the fans depending on the temperature.