ECS PN1 SLI2 Extreme Motherboard Review

Bundle and BIOS

The PN1 SLI2 comes with a pretty good bundle. You get your color manual, driver and application CD’s as you would expect. You also get a multitude of cables, including your IDE, floppy, SATA and power adaptor cables. ECS also gives you a CAT5 cable for you lan, which is a nice bonus. You also get firewire and USB headers for the back of your rig. You have your backplate included in this bundle, as well as a 3 1/2″ dock for USB and audio (beige though, does anyone still use that color?) You also have you SLI bridge for running two Nvidia cards together. Lastly, you have your all-important backplate for your rig. Not a bad bundle at all! Let’s look at the bios.

ECS went with the Award bios, which is very popular and easy to navigate. Let’s just take a look at a few of the pages vbefore we get to the really interesting parts.

Integrated Peripherals page.

Advanced Chipset page is where you will get to many of your settings for overclocking and tweaking.

The health page does a good job of giving the info that you need.

The Performance Options page is where the fun is. There are options to set your memory for SLI if you have SLI-capable memory. Let’s look closer!

FSB actually goes us to 2000 (500×4 – don’t get to excited), which was more than enough (you will understand that in the overclocking page).

vCore goes up to 1.8v, which is just fantastic. ECS did good there!

mem speed can be set independently, and may be set up to speeds of ddr2 1400.

Vdimm is able to be set at 2.5v, which is pretty good. The next couple shots show you the chipset voltages available…

You can run the system clock at linked, optimal, or expert mode. This comes in very handy when overclocking.

That is really everything that is of interest. Notice, there was no option to set the CPU multiplier, which hurt us in our overclocking. Let’s move on.