ECS KN1 Extreme (nForce4 Ultra) Motherboard Review

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 £94 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

Hexus
ECS KN1 Extreme Review