A Closer Look:

   The KN1 has the largest box I’ve ever seen for a motherboard, not that there is much empty space, the only extra cables you should need to setup a new computer are the external ones.

   The KN1 is a good entrance into high end motherboards, but it’s not perfect. Two problems are noticed very quickly when you setup the motherboard.

   The biggest, most annoying “feature” is the “Dr. LED Fuzzy logic design for diagnosing PCI slots health “. While it might be useful for diagnosing a faulty PCI card or slot, the other 99.9999999… percent of the time I want it off. The only thing I can suggest is to cover up the LED’s, they are incredibly bright.

Ram locking contact

Another view

   Another, much more minor thing, is the placement of the Ram slots, because they are so close to the plane that video cards take up, some slots can not be opened with a video card installed. Also notice that my ram is side-by-side, the KN1 put the "Dual channel" slots beside each other; I think it's much more intuitive that way.

Board layout

Capacitor cooling

   Other than that, the layout of the board is very clean, due to ECS covering all the PCB in a coating that hides the normal copper wiring. At first I just thought they put everything under the board, it's a nice effect. There is a large grouping of capacitors right by the CPU socket, and a small yet quiet fan and duct to suck the air past them for cooling. I noticed no increase in the sound over my CPU/video card fans or hard drive noises.

   To test the reliability of the motherboard, I have been running a combination of programs for the last week. While I’m sleeping, I loop 3d Mark 2005. When I wake up, I run a looping demo of Quake4 until I feel the need to do some gaming or work. Even with the various over clocking done to the board, as long as the board boots in the first place, it’s run without a single hitch.

   But you know there is something to be said for Murphy, and I’ve had my share of his laws. ECS decided to meet Murphy head on and do as much as possible to make sure you can’t screw up your motherboard.

   “Top hat flash”. Remember that name, it’s a thing of beauty. Power goes out during a bios update, OH LORD NO! Right? Wrong! With the setup ECS has for the KN1 has, you can’t possibly screw up your bios without physically damaging it. If something goes wrong, you just push the “top hat” onto the only chip that it will fit over on the motherboard, boot up (after reading the manual about 3000 times just to be sure of what you are doing) remove the Top-hat and boom, done. The bios has been reset.

   As far as I’m concerned, from this point forward, any motherboard that does not include a system that does the same thing (functionally of course, the Gigabyte dual bios is the same idea) will lose at least 1 point out of 10 towards their score. It’s just too important if you want to do any kind of over clocking, hell –any- kind of customizing or updating of your computers bios, to be able to just “trust” that your bios won’t become corrupt or that something won’t happen.

The "Tophat"

The bottom of the top ;)