Home page » Motherboards

Search Motherboards:

Refine search for Motherboards

Abit has taken a bit of a beating over the past few years, especially on the reputation front. This was unfortunate to see, especially as some of my favourite motherboards have been from Abit – most notably the BP6.

However, since its buyout by USI, I've seen some really positive steps being made by Abit to try and rebuild its reputation of producing top quality, enthusiast level motherboards.

This board is based on the nForce 570 SLI chipset. Unlike the nForce 590 SLI, this is a single chip solution. This means that when in SLI mode, only eight lanes are available to each graphics card, not 16. However, in tests conduced by our sister publication Bit-Tech and also seen in our LinkBoost testing, as well as our RD580 testing, we don't currently need any more than eight lanes of bandwidth.

This leaves the 570 SLI chipset lacking LinkBoost (oh no!) and what nVidia call “max overclocking”. Generally speaking, most of the Nforce 570 SLI motherboards are poor overclockers.

The layout of the KN9 is excellent – very well thought out and neat. At the very bottom of the motherboard is the CMOS reset jumper, which is nice and easy to get to. There are two FireWire headers and on the right hand side there are three USB 2.0 headers. Neatly arranged above these, are six SATA connections. Having six means it can support two RAID 5 arrays – should you want to.

The ATX connector is at the very edge of the board, as is the single IDE channel. In fact, all the connectors are around the outside edges, for easy access.

The chipset has a small heatsink, but the heat is transferred by a heatpipe to a larger heatsink at the top of the board, which also cools the voltage regulators. If you're using two-slot graphics cards, this is great as it means there is no fan to obstruct the cooling contraptions.

One thing I have noticed in this group test is how much better companies are spacing the expansion slots these days. There are obviously two PCI Express slots for graphics, with two x1 slots in between. Having this two slot spacing between the cards gives them more room to breathe. However, there are also two PCI slots at the bottom. Even if you use a two slot card, you have an at least one PCI slot left over for fitting an X-Fi or a Physics card. But if you use a single slot card such as a 7950 GT, you can fit both.

Audio is provdied by the capable Realtek ALC883 chipset, and a couple of Marvell chips make sure we have dual Gigabit LAN. There is optical S/PDIF output, but no Coaxial. There are six analogue outputs for full eight channel support. Four USB 2.0 ports are on the back panel, as well as the standard PS/2.

No FireWire ports are on the back panel, but a bracket is included with another two USB 2.0 ports, a six pin FireWire port and a smaller 4-pin connector. There are only four fan headers, but these are fairly well positioned.

The BIOS was pretty easy to navigate and the voltage options were admirable – up to 2.1V on the CPU, 2.3V on the memory (with 0.03V granularity) and 1.2-1.4V for the chipset and HT.

Overclocking this board was a pretty easy affair and it was quite happy to around the 300MHz mark. This is pretty good for a 570 Chipset board, but obviously expect this to vary from board to board.

One disappointment was that it didn't autorecover when I overclocked it too far. In fact, pulling the battery out didn't do anything either. Using the reset CMOS jumper worked a charm, but it would be better to have some sort of recovery.

Verdict

A solid stable board, at a more than reasonable price. Good enough for some mild overclocking, and well worth considering

Add your comment

© 2003-2008 TrustedReviews | About Us | Contact Us | Legal | Privacy | RSS