ECS nForces just as well as everyone else

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Product: ECS PN2 SLI2+ Motherboard
Website: WWW.ECS.COM.TW
System Requirements: Well, the rest of the PC really
Price: £180, $250

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TODAY WE BRING YOU our First Inqpression of the latest motherboard from ECS based on the nForce 680i SLI chipset from Nvidia. After some fairly serious problems at first, particularly with data corruption, the 680i boards seem to have the kinks ironed out and this offering from ECS had none of the problems previously exhibited by some other motherboards based on this chipset.

All boxed up

According to our good friend Randolph de Boite the box is something of a let down because although the design does look good the blue / black colour scheme is not particularly eye-catching. The box is, however a good size and weight making you feel like you're really getting something for your money, without being so big as to be unwieldy.

With all the trimmings

In the box you'll find a massive assortment of bits and bobs to connect up this board to the rest of the components. Along with the motherboard, driver CD and manual you'll find six S-ATA data cables and power converters, IDE ribbon cables, USB and 1394 bracket, a 2.5" drive bay mask for USB and 1394, network cable, ATX rear case mask, eS-ATA bracket and a cooling fan. The cooling fan is designed to attach to the heatsink that cools the north and southbridge via heatpipe and according to the box should be used if you intend to overclock the motherboard. Given that this board is so clearly aimed at enthusiasts that will be just about everyone, so we recommend just attaching it right from the beginning. Interesting you'll also find an SLI connector bridge in the box which is longer than the standard one you will get with your graphics cards, to cater for the slightly odd PCIe SLI slot layout.

The board itself

A lot of connectors for such a small space

As you can see from the picture this motherboard comes with three PCIe x16 slots, with the two black ones designed to be joined in SLI matrimony, while the blue one runs at x8 and can be used for either a third graphics card or for something like a physics card or similar. There are two PCI slots and two PCIe x1 slots available. There are other design idiosyncrasies with this board, such as the pair of side facing S-ATA2 ports and floppy connector. The layout is fairly obviously designed with a mind to a pair of big graphics cards being installed without inhibiting access to the other connections. There are also four other S-ATA2 connectors, four colour coded memory slots, power connector and a single IDE connector and a curiously located front panel connector all crowded together. One particularly nice feature is the status-LED that will help figure out precisely what falls over when you start pushing the board to breaking point.

The back panel

The back panel has pretty much everything you'd expect to see, PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard, optical and analogue audio connectors for the eight channel sound, USB and 1394 ports and a pair of GigE ports as well. It's worth mentioning at this point that ECS has essentially taken the reference board design here and rebranded it, rather than design a whole new board from scratch around the chipset. This means that the board can come out to market that much sooner and that it is very similar to other offerings by manufacturers that have done the same thing.

The sheer number of connectors, combined with the fact that most users will have larger graphics cards and CPU cooler attached means that this board may get crowded very quickly so we recommend getting a spacious case to fit this in to make sure everything has room to breathe.

It is in the BIOS and the features it allows you to access that really makes this board shine and shows us what Nvidia had in mind when they developed the nForce 680i chipset. The CPU frequency is adjustable from 100MHz to 625MHz in 0.25MHz increments and the CPU voltage can be adjusted in 12.5mV steps up to a maximum of 1.8V. The memory can go from 400MHz to 1400MHz in 1MHz increments and the 1.8V to 2.5V in steps of 25mV. Similarly the PCIe x16 channels can be individually set anywhere between 100MHz and 200MHz in 1MHz adjustments. These precise levels of configuration, along with all the other settings available mean that enthusiasts can fiddle around to their hearts content to make sure they get the absolute maximum from their hardware.

Our range of benchmarks proved that this board is no slouch in terms of performance, but obviously precisely what you get out of it depends a lot on the components you plug into it and how you configure them. We're happy to report that the board was completely rock solid with several configurations at stock settings and continued to perform very well during overclocking.

In Short
As you may have noticed in the header, this board is not cheap, but that is one of the few things that count against it. The PN2 SLI2+ is well laid out and packed full of features with support for all the latest technologies you can think of from a quad core CPU to dual GPUs in SLI and plenty other acronyms to boot. About the only other thing we can really say against this motherboard is that because of it's based of the reference design it's pretty much identical to others of the same ilk, so there's no reason to not get one of them if you find a better deal. ?

The Good
Excellent stable performance
Huge range of overclocking and tuning functions
Good layout
Status LEDS

The Bad
Expensive

The Ugly
Just about exactly the same as the other branded 680i reference boards around

Bartender's Report