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ECS KN1 Extreme

The KN1 Extreme is ECS' first entry in to the nForce4 and Athlon64 world. In fact, it might be said that it is ECS' first true entry into the enthusiast motherboard market ever. We put it through our normal evalutions and come away surprised.

Subsystem Testing

NOTE: For all Subsystem Testing, an AMD Athlon64 socket 939 FX-53 CPU (12x200MHz) with a 200MHz FSB and 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX KHX3500 memory modules running at 400MHz were used.

Audio – Subjective Listening

One of the easiest ways to determine the quality of the audio subsystem is via a subjective sound test. Ideally, a sound test requires audio covering the entire spectrum, from subtle to intense. For this test, I chose selected tracks from the self-titled Element Eighty album.

While the audio playback was distortion free, I could only get sound to come from the front 2 speakers with the board set to play in 5.1 mode with all 6 speakers attached to the rear panel analog output ports. Note that I tried multiple albums and various MP3s, all with the same results.

Audio – Microphone Port Testing

The MIC-IN input was tested using a Labtec Desk Mic 524. Spoken words were recorded and played back using Microsoft Sound Recorder, with the Microphone Boost option disabled and enabled. The Microphone Boost option is found within the Advanced menu under the Microphone section within the Volume Control menu.

The playback of the recorded audio was clear and distortion-free, both with and without Microphone Boost enabled.

Audio – In Game Testing

In addition to CD or MP3 playback, users most often rely on the audio subsystem for gaming, whether it be for standalone first person shooters or online deathmatching. To test the quality of the audio subsystem during game type scenarios adequately, we took benchmark measurements with sound enabled and disabled using the following benchmarks: Jedi Knight 2 and Comanche 4.

In the case of both games, in-game audio performance was top notch with neither impacting overall system performance by more than 10%. As expected, the impact during D3D game play was less than that seen during the OpenGL game. Overall, the audio subsystem performed as expected with the only caveat being the limited to the 2 channel audio performance seen during CD audio playback.

Drive Performance

To test the capabilities of the on board USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 connections adequately, we chose to use an ACOMDATA HD060U2FE-72-USB 2.0/FireWire HDD connected first to the USB port and then to the IEEE 1394 port. SATA and IDE drive tests were performed using Maxtor 40Gb ATA 133 model 6E040L0 hard drives on the IDE headers and Seagate 80 GB Barracuda SATA hard drives on the SATA headers. The SATA drives were used for testing in a RAID 0 16k block size configuration on both the NVIDIA and SIS-based RAID controllers. IDE drives on the same and separate ATA-133 ports were tested in a RAID 0 16k block size configuration, as well as a mixed IDE /SATA drive RAID 0 16k block size configuration, on both controllers as well. Testing was also conducted using a standalone SATA drive on both the NVIDIA and SIS controllers, a standalone IDE drive on the SIS controller and an IDE drive connected in a primary/slave configuration on the NVIDIA controller. All drive benchmarks were performed using the open source Iometer program.

While the SATA RAID 0 array proved to be the performance king, only the NVIDIA-based array configuration really stood out in terms of performance. On the SIS controller, the SATA RAID 0 and the mixed SATA/IDE RAID 0 arrays seemed to have identical performance. The mixed array on the NVIDIA controller performed identically to the same on the SIS controller, but lagged the speed of the pure SATA RAID 0 array on the NVIDIA controller. With the exception of the dismal SATA RAID 0 array performance on the SIS controller, all other arrays and standalone drive configurations remained equal between the two controller configurations. Both external device configurations performed equally well, with no real performance difference between either the IEEE 1394 or the USB 2.0 device.

Network Utilization Tests

Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used in conjunction with Windows Task Manager to measure the performance of both the NVIDIA Gigabit NIC and the Realtek 10/100 NIC. DU meter was used to measure bandwidth, with Windows Task Manager to monitor the CPU utilization on the test system. For the test itself, we created a 750MB archive file containing one large .WMA audio file for the large file transfer test. We also created a 750MB archive file with various sized .WMA audio files for the small files transfer test. Finally, we used an Intel PRO/1000MT Gigabit NIC on the host system with a crossover cable to connect the host system to the test system. A crossover cable was used to rule out any possible bandwidth losses due to hub or switch passage.

NVIDIA GigE controller

While the download transfer results are surprising, both upload and download speeds were within expectations. The CPU utilization hovered around 20% for the duration of the transfer tests.

The large file transfer results are much better than those of the small file transfer, with the download speed averaging over 30 MB/s and coming in at almost 10 MB/s faster than the upload speed. You do pay a penalty for that performance in the form of CPU utilization, with the utilization remaining 10% higher during download than upload tasks.

Realtek 10/100 controller

The Realtek NIC performed very well during the small file download tests, with both operations averaging around 10 MB/s during transfer. The CPU utilization was a bit high coming in at 20% though.

The large file transfer results mimicked those of the small file transfer, with the average transfer speed just over 10 MB/s and the CPU utilization staying at around 20%.

Test Systems

The following system configurations were used for the Sandra memory benchmark graph, as well as all graphs listed under the Application and Gaming Benchmarks sections:

For the Unreal Tournament 2003 and Doom3 benchmarks, the following additional system configurations were used:

Naturally, our two legacy systems will not be kept up to date with the latest technology, but they both use DDR400, ATA133 IDE hard drives, and ATI 9800 XT video cards. The following table describes these legacy systems in detail:

Graphs are labeled as follows: Motherboard - CPU Clock - FSB Clock - Memory Clock

SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

Note that all results above were obtained running the installed memory in Dual Channel mode.

The KN1 Extreme easily keeps pace with the other Athlon64 solutions. Note the slight dip in memory performance observed while using the Athlon64 X2 processor.