Verdict: A layout worse than the Labyrinth of the Minotaur

ECS is arguably best known for its low-cost motherboards, so it came as quite a surprise when the £135 KN2 SLI arrived.

The KN2 SLI is expensive because it's based on the nForce4 SLI X16 chipset, which provides two 16x PCI-E slots, instead of the two 8x PCI-E slots of the original nForce4 SLI chipset. However, we've yet to see any performance advantage from the faster PCI-E slots, which is pretty ridiculous when the chipset is so much more expensive.

The KN2 SLI is a very oddly designed motherboard. For some reason, one of the two nForce4 chips is located on a separate daughterboard that has to be plugged into a huge slot situated between the PCI-E slots and CPU socket. This not only hampers airflow across the motherboard, but is also totally unnecessary, as there's a huge area of empty PCB space at the right side of the motherboard. To rub salt into the wound, the two 16x PCI-E slots are placed very close together, which makes it very difficult to water cool or fit Arctic Cooling VGA Silencers to the graphics cards.

The nForce4 SLI X16 chipset is augmented by a Silicon Image RAID controller, so the KN2 SLI has six RAID-capable S-ATA II ports and two RAID-capable EIDE channels. There are also ten USB 2 ports and two FireWire ports, one Gigabit Ethernet port, one 10/100 Ethernet port plus eight-channel AC97 audio via a Realtek ALC850 chip. The KN2 SLI also supports Top-Hat Flash, which is a second BIOS chip that clips onto the motherboard in case the on-board BIOS fails.

With our test Corsair memory installed, the KN2 SLI defaulted to a 1T Command Rate, so its out-of-the-box performance is very competitive. However, we had to increase the CPU voltage by 0.25V before it would complete the multitasking benchmark, which is due to either a bug in the BIOS or poor voltage regulation. Worse still, it wouldn't overclock stably above a 215MHz FSB.

There are only a few SLI 16X-based motherboards to choose from, but the KN2 SLI clearly isn't worth short-listing. It's poorly laid out, doesn't overclock well and needs overvolting even before it will run our test CPU at its default frequency.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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