ECS KN1 Extreme Mainboard on NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra: Where Extreme and Value Meet

by Ilya Gavrichenkov
02/28/2005 | 12:54 PM

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), the major mainboard maker, used to lack popularity among power users as most of its products were targeted at the low price category. ECS solutions used to have excellent price/performance ratio but couldn’t meet the demands of PC enthusiasts because of their rather limited functionality.

To be honest, some products from ECS did win recognition among the enthusiasts – take its mainboards for the Athlon 64 on SiS chipsets, for example. But that was mostly because other manufacturers didn’t use chipsets from SiS at all, so ECS’s mainboards just had no alternatives in the market.

Things are changing of course. Many mainboard makers are trying to enter new markets, and ECS is among them. While some renowned companies are introducing their first budget solutions, encroaching on ECS’s traditional grounds, ECS is moving in the opposite direction. Not long ago ECS began to produce midrange and top-end mainboards for enthusiasts that were intended to become competitors to mainboards from such giants as ASUS, ABIT, MSI and others.

That’s how the Extreme series of ECS mainboards was introduced. ECS positions this series for demanding users; these mainboards aren’t expected to be low-cost but shouldn’t be inferior in functionality to products of the same price from other manufacturers.

Today we’ll get to know one of the most promising models from ECS Extreme series. The ECS KN1 Extreme supports Socket 939 processors from the Athlon 64 family and is based on the NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra chipset that PC enthusiasts have come to like so much.

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.

Closer Look

There’s nothing extraordinary about the basic characteristics of the ECS KN1 Extreme mainboard. In spite of the alluring labels on the PCB and half-a-page enumeration of various innovative technologies listed in the user manual, the ECS KN1 Extreme mainboard is perfectly analogous to any other Socket 939 mainboard in terms of supported processors and memory.

That means the ECS KN1 Extreme can work with any Socket 939 processor from AMD Athlon 64 series, based on ClawHammer/NewCastle as well as on the new Winchester core. The latest announcements from AMD give hope that the mainboard will also support the dual-core Athlon 64 processors that are scheduled to emerge in the second half of this year.

The mainboard’s four DDR DIMM slots are ready to take in modules of DDR400 SDRAM. The slots are color-coded: you should insert the modules into the same-color slots to enable the dual-channel memory access.

The maximum amount of system memory the mainboard supports is 4 gigabytes, although the Athlon 64 CPU is capable of addressing much larger amounts of memory. Note also that if the mainboard’s four DIMM slots are all occupied with double-sided DDR SDRAM modules, the memory can only be clocked at 333MHz or lower frequency according to the specifics of the memory controller integrated into the Athlon 64.

Your graphics card goes into the single PCI Express x16 slot: the mainboard is based on the nForce4 Ultra and doesn’t support the dual-GPU SLI mode. Instead, the mainboard offers two PCI Express x1 slots and three ordinary PCI slots for your expansion cards. The middle PCI slot is colored orange: this slot features additional stabilization of the power lines and is recommended for installation of add-on audio cards.

The integrated sound is realized with the help of the chipset and a six-channel AC’97 Realtek ALC655 codec. Mainboards on the nForce4 Ultra chipset usually come with Realtek ALC850 codec as it can implement fully the audio capabilities of the chipset. ECS gave it up for some reason, thus reducing the number of audio channels from eight to six. As a consequence, there are only three audio jacks at the mainboard back panel. At the same time, the mainboard has optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs – the appropriate connectors are found at the back panel, too. The change of the codec didn’t actually tell in any negative way on the other functions, either. For example, the nvMixer utility works without problems with the ECS KN1 Extreme. Jack Sensing technology is also fully supported.

As for the quality of the sound produced by the audio solution implemented on the reviewed mainboard, it got the following grades:

General performance: Average

The quality of the sound remains rather average even with another codec. Well, that’s quite typical for mainboards that use the audio capabilities of nForce4 series chipsets. We’ve already got accustomed to that.

The ECS developer team also took an untypical approach when endowing the mainboard with networking functions. There are two network controllers on the ECS KN1 Extreme mainboard. The first one is integrated into the nForce4 Ultra chipset and is already well known to us. The key feature of this controller is the integrated hardware protection tool ActiveArmor thanks to which NVIDIA’s Firewall puts a very small load on the CPU when filtering the network traffic. This controller provides Gigabit Ethernet. The second controller on the ECS mainboard is Fast Ethernet only, i.e. it supports 10/100Mbps data-transfer rates. It is implemented by the external PCI chip from Realtek aka 8100C and can hardly be of any interest today.

What’s much more interesting is the Wi-Fi dongle optionally supplied with the ECS KN1 Extreme. Although with an Elitegroup label, the device is actually called ZyDAS ZD1211 and you can read its description here.

This gadget works across the USB 2.0 interface and supports the IEEE 802.11b/g wireless protocol that allows data-transfer rates up to 54Mbps. Using the software you receive with the device you can make it work in Ad Hoc as well as in the Infrastructure mode. The device can serve as a programmable access point for up to 31 clients. In other words, you can use this USB dongle to deploy a wireless network or to connect to existing ones. Again, it is an optional accessory to the ECS KN1 Extreme mainboard.

Interesting too are the ECS KN1 Extreme’s abilities in supporting hard disk drives. ECS considered the chipset capabilities insufficient and enforced them using an additional ATA RAID SiS180 controller. As a result, the ECS KN1 Extreme supports two Parallel ATA channels (for up to four devices) and four Serial ATA II channels (with a data-transfer rate up to 3Gbps) through the chipset. RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 is supported for all these channels. Added to that are one more Parallel ATA-133 and two Serial ATA-150 channels, implemented though the SiS controller. The drives attached to this controller can also be united into arrays of levels 0, 1 or 0+1. But like with the second network controller ECS decided to save on the cost and took an out-dated chip that has two drawbacks: SiS180 doesn’t support Serial ATA II and connects via the 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus instead of the PCI Express x1, which may negatively affect the speed of the RAID arrays.

We checked this out in practice, building a RAID 0 array out of Raptor WD360GD drives from Western Digital and attaching them to the chipset’s controller and then to the SiS180. Then we measured the performance of the array in the HDD Test Suite from Futuremark’s PCMark04.

As you see, the SiS180 is by far inferior to the dual RAID controller integrated into the nForce4 Ultra in terms of speed, especially at copying files when the limited bandwidth of the PCI bus doesn’t allow the external RAID controller from SiS to show better results.

The ECS KN1 Extreme mainboard offers the user ten USB 2.0 ports the nForce4 Ultra chipset supports. You can find four ports at the back panel of the mainboard, and the remaining six are onboard pin-connectors. The two 400Mbps IEEE1394a ports implemented through the TI TSB43AB22A controller are also pin-connectors on the PCB. A back-panel bracket with two FireWire and two USB 2.0 ports is enclosed with the mainboard. The FireWire ports are different on this bracket (4-pin and 6-pin), but the main feature of this bracket is that you can use additional plastic housing to move these ports to the front panel of your system case.

PCB Design

If asked to characterize the design of this mainboard PCB in a single word, we’d call it “peculiar”. As any mainboard PCB design it has highs and lows about it, and there are also a few truly eccentric solutions here, which arouse very diverse reactions. But let’s discuss each feature in its own time.

First of all, the PCB of the ECS KN1 Extreme doesn’t copy the reference one. It’s all right since the reference board on the nForce4 Ultra chipset has a rather mediocre PCB layout. ECS had put more thought into their product. At least, the placement of the slots and connectors is much handier on the ECS KN1 Extreme.

Particularly, the new 24-pin ATX power connector (compatible with the older 20-pin plug) is located in front of the DIMM slots, and the additional 12V connector is found on the right side of the mainboard, behind the CPU socket. The main Parallel and Serial ATA connectors – the ones the chipset is responsible for – are also conveniently placed: the Parallel ATA in front of the DIMM slots and the Serial ATA in front of the chipset. The rest of the connectors were almost all moved to the left side of the PCB where they shouldn’t cause any problems. The Clear CMOS jumper is there, too, and is easily accessible even when the mainboard is installed into the system case.

However, this design solution is not absolutely flawless. For example, the FDD connector is also near the left edge of the PCB, at the same level with the PCI slot. It means you have to lay the FDD cable through the entire length of the system case to connect a floppy drive.

The flash memory chip with the BIOS is soldered to the PCB here. This may be a trouble if the contents of the chip become corrupt. And although ECS says the mainboard supports Top-Hat Flash technology for restoring the contents of the flash memory by putting an analogous chip on top of the existing one, there are no necessary tools to do this operation among the accessories supplied together with the mainboard.

The connectors of the additional SiS180 controller aren’t located properly. The Parallel ATA slot is at the left edge of the mainboard and Serial ATA connectors are right in front of the PCI Express x16 slot, so you may have problems with the graphics card if you use them. On the other hand, the owners of the ECS KN1 Extreme will most likely prefer the chipset’s Serial ATA ports, so this is not a very big drawback, actually.

By the way, ECS equipped this mainboard with a new type of Serial ATA connectors: they feature restrictive edging. Such connectors prevent Serial ATA cables from sliding out as happens sometimes with older connectors. It is strange few manufacturers are using such connectors so far, but it a definite plus ECS solution scores against the competitors’ background.

The ECS KN1 Extreme carries three PCI slots, like many other nForce4 Ultra-based mainboards. They are located to the left of the PCI Express x16 connector, so you’ll most probably have only two of them at your disposal. A curious feature of the ECS KN1 Extreme is that there’s a blue LED near each PCI and PCI Express x1 slot. The LED starts to blink if the corresponding slot is empty or works incorrectly. If there’s an expansion card installed, the LED is constantly lit up. The manufacturer must have devised this as a means to improve the visual appeal of the product, but we personally thought these constantly blinking LEDs could be rather annoying.

There’s one more LED on the mainboard, called Anti-Burn LED. This red indicator is placed near the DIMM slots and warns the user that modules shouldn’t be installed in until the mainboard is turned off.

The chipset is cooled with a massive aluminum cooler. It is good ECS took this problem seriously as the nForce4 Ultra is a really hot chip. The installed cooler can keep it really cool, but ECS seems to have saved on the fan. The fan on sleeve bearings is rather noisy – it is rotating at a constant speed of 5800rpm, which cannot be adjusted.

The CPU voltage regulation module on the ECS KN1 Extreme is based on the three-channel design. The MOSFETs of this circuit are rather hot at work, and ECS took care of their cooling. There is an additional 40mm fan at the mainboard back panel, under a plastic casing. This fan is creating airflow around the MOSFETs and exhausts hot air outside.

Although this solution does help to keep the power components cool and contributes to the cooling of the CPU, too, it is not free from drawbacks, especially in this particular implementation. Like with the chipset cooler, the problem is with the fan, again. This sleeve-bearings fan is rotating at 6500rpm and its speed remains always constant. As a result, the two fans of the ECS KN1 Extreme mainboard join their voices in a duet that is loud enough to kill the noise from the other coolers and hard disk drives of your system.

The CPU voltage regulator circuit isn’t perfect too. The problem comes from the electrolytic capacitors by OST used in it. Users sometimes complain about their low reliability – they are prone to lose the electrolyte and bloat out.

The CPU socket has enough free space around it to allow installing massive coolers. However, the Zalman CNPS7700Cu cooler mounts on the ECS KN1 Extreme with difficulty because of the plastic casing around the voltage regulator cooling system.

Now let’s take a look at the back panel of the mainboard. It carries two PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard, one serial port, the output of the cooling system of the CPU voltage regulator, optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs, four High-Speed USB ports, two network RJ-45 connectors with diagnostic LEDs and three audio jacks.

Unfortunately, the parallel port is missing on the back panel of this board, but you can attach one to the onboard pin-connector laid out on the PCB.

BIOS and Overclocking

We were testing the ECS KN1 Extreme mainboard using BIOS 1.0c, the only available version at the time we were working on  this review.

The ECS KN1 Extreme’s BIOS uses the Award-Phoenix microcode and has a typical interface with typical options, but despite that, the ECS engineers puzzled us at first. We are not talking about the mainboard’s inability to disable the additional SiS180 RAID controller, although its initialization makes the start-up time somewhat longer. We can put up with that. But you can have much more serious problems during the usual mainboard configuration in the most obvious way.

Well, these were exactly the problems we encountered during the initial acquaintance with the mainboard. It wasn’t difficult to identify them: there is a Load Performance option on the very first page of the BIOS Setup. The name was enticing, but this option turned out to cause problems rather than increase the performance. And the ECS KN1 Extreme was just about to get a pretty negative review from us until we cleared out this issue.

Formally, the mainboard does the following trick when you select the Load Performance option: the CPU frequency multiplier gets reduced by 0.5x below the default setting, while the frequency of the clock generator is increased to make the resulting CPU frequency normal. For example, the default multiplier for our Athlon 64 3800+ is 12x. In the Performance mode, the ECS KN1 Extreme sets up the processor’s frequency as 11.5 x 209.5MHz.

In other words, the mainboard overclocks the memory and the HyperTransport bus a little and the overall performance does grow up relative to the default CPU mode. But well – that’s nothing but overclocking, and there can be various problems due to the non-regular operational mode of the memory and HyperTransport like non-working Cool’n’Quiet technology and the impossibility of overclocking the CPU from the BIOS. Of course these things perplexed us a lot, since the mainboard’s manual didn’t say anything on this point.

We eventually revealed the origin of the problem; as said above, it was the Load Performance option. So we had to turn this option off for our further investigation of the ECS KN1 Extreme features.

What are the overclocking options the ECS KN1 Extreme offers? Strangely enough, they are all scattered around different pages of the mainboard BIOS Setup. For example, the option for changing the CPU multiplier is found in the Power Management Setup section. However, below we will give you the full list of all overclocking-related functions irrespective of their position in the BIOS Setup, though. So, the ECS KN1 Extreme can:

• Regulate the frequency of the clock generator from 200 to 250MHz with 0.5MHz increment (when this frequency is below 210MHz), 1MHz increment (when the frequency is below 230MHz) or 2MHz increment (above 230MHz);
• Reduce the CPU multiplier below the default value. The minimal available multiplier is 4x;
• Set up the frequency and the width of the HyperTransport bus. The frequency of this bus is set by a multiplier relative to the clock-generator frequency. This multiplier can be 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x or 5x. The width of the bus can be set to 8 or 16 bits in either direction;
• Increase the CPU voltage by up to 0.375V with 25 millivolts increment;
• Adjust the voltage on the DIMM slots. It can range from 2.55V to 3.11V with 0.08V increment.

Alas, but that’s all. The BIOS Setup offers no options to control the frequency of the PCI Express bus, but the ECS KN1 Extreme clocks it asynchronously. Regardless of the clock generator, the frequency of the PCI Express bus is always at the default 100MHz. It’s the same with the PCI bus, too.

The ECS KN1 Extreme doesn’t also permit to change the chipset voltage, but as we have seen with other nForce4 Ultra-based mainboards this setting doesn’t affect the mainboard’s overclockability at all.

As for the available overclocking functions, the mainboard’s obvious advantage is its ability to vary the voltages of the memory and CPU in a rather wide range; its disadvantage is the inability to raise the clock-generator frequency above 250MHz. All in all we have to confess the ECS KN1 Extreme mainboard is not really an overclocker-friendly product, at least with the current version of its BIOS.

The memory controller settings available in the BIOS Setup aren’t very generous, either. There are in fact no other options except choosing the memory frequency and Tcl, Trcd, Tras and Trp timings. Moreover, the mainboard doesn’t always set Trcd as chosen in the BIOS Setup – sometimes it increases this timing by itself. The most unpleasant thing, however, is that the mainboard doesn’t allow controlling the 1T/2T Memory Timings parameter. It is always set to 1T Memory Timing.

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.

Software

This section of the review of the ECS KN1 Extreme is going to be short. ECS just doesn’t add any exclusive programs for configuring and monitoring the mainboard. The software bundle you receive with the board includes NVIDIA’s utilities (nTune, nvMixer, nvRAID, and Firewall 2.0), and Award’s WinFlash program for re-flashing the BIOS from Windows.

Testbed and Methods

We will offer you the results of our traditional performance tests now. We will compare the ECS KN1 Extreme to the mainboards on NVIDIA’s nForce4 Ultra and SLI chipsets we have tested earlier and to the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum which is based on NVIDIA’s previous chipset, nForce3 Ultra. To make the comparison correct, we had to use analogous graphics cards based on the ATI RADEON X800 XT GPU, with AGP 8x and PCI Express x16 interfaces. Otherwise the test systems were identical.

So, we used the following hardware in our tests:

• AMD Athlon 64 3800+ CPU (2.4GHz, 512KB L2 cache);

• Mainboards:
• Chaintech VNF4 Ultra VE  (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
• ECS KN1 Extreme (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
• EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
• Foxconn WinFast NF4UK8AA-8EKRS (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
• MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra);
• MSI K8N Diamond (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI).
• 1024MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO, 2 x 512MB, 2-2-2-10).
• Graphics cards:
• PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (AGP 8x, 500MHz/500MHz);
• PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (PCI Express x16, 500MHz/500MHz).
• Western Digital Raptor WD740GD HDD (Serial ATA-150).

We performed our tests in Windows XP with Service Pack 2.

We benchmarked the ECS KN1 Extreme in its regular mode (the CPU frequency was set as 12 x 200MHz), i.e. the Load Performance option was turned off. By enabling this option you can increase the performance of the computer by no more than a fraction of percent.

Performance

Apart of the strange failure in 3DMark05, the ECS KN1 Extreme mainboard is on the same level of performance as the earlier-reviewed mainboards on chipsets from the nForce4 family. In other words, it’s sufficiently fast for an nForce4 Ultra-based product.

Conclusion

Before making our final judgment about the ECS KN1 Extreme mainboard we have reviewed today, we want to say a couple of words about mainboards on the NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra chipset in general. And this is not to praise them, unfortunately. We have already tested five mainboards on the new chipset from NVIDIA in our labs and none of them was free from some defects resulting from the “rawness” of the platform. We can’t but admit that nForce4-based mainboards haven’t yet matured out of their “childhood diseases”. We guess people who are considering a purchase of a PCI Express platform for the Athlon 64 processor should keep this fact in mind.

However, let’s return to our today’s hero. The ECS KN1 Extreme, like many other mainboards on the nForce4 Ultra, is not free from certain flaws. The saddest thing is certainly the BIOS with its scanty overclocking options – for some reason it doesn’t allow setting a clock-generator frequency above 222MHz.

This defect, however, may be corrected by the manufacturer later. What’s rather alarming in the ECS KN1 Extreme is the manufacturer’s tendency to cost-saving on the electronic components. This board uses cheap capacitors, cheap fans on sleeve-bearings, and obsolete onboard controllers. Of course, this helped to put a very appealing price tag on the ECS KN1 Extreme, but at the tradeoff of making it not as stable as it could be. It’s up to you to decide if you want to save your money this way.

Aside of these shortcomings, the ECS KN1 Extreme may become a good purchase. It is designed properly and can theoretically support high clock-generator frequencies. Surely some people will also be fascinated by the exterior of this mainboard. The low price of this product is its killer advantage, of course, but its functionality is good enough nonetheless.

In brief, ECS had wanted to make a mainboard for PC enthusiasts, but released just another budget product, although with extended functionality.

Highs:

• Low price for an nForce4 Ultra-based product;
• Good accessories (some of them optional), including a USB 2.0 Wi-Fi controller;
• Two network controllers, proving Gigabit Ethernet (with ActiveArmor) and Fast Ethernet;
• Additional RAID controller thanks to which the mainboard has six Serial ATA and three Parallel ATA channels;
• FireWire;
• Good cooling of the chipset and the CPU voltage regulator.

Lows:

• Minor problems with the BIOS;
• Noisy fans;
• Problems when overclocking the CPU from the BIOS Setup;
• Unreliable capacitors and obsolete onboard controllers.