ECS - PN2 SLI2+ review
high end Nforce 680i board
Review date: 13 March, 2007. Review by: IT Reviews Staff
The key feature is the pair of PCI Express slots that give you a full 16 lanes each, and there's a third slot that can supply eight PCI Express lanes. Clearly that's a nod to the future when you'll be able to use a lesser graphics card to handle the physics in intensive games.
In addition, there are two PCI Express x1 slots and two regular PCI slots, but depending on which types of graphics cards you install it's quite possible that there will be barely any usable expansion available. Thankfully the three PCI Express slots use a latch that you can release quite simply when the slots are populated.
The Nvidia chipset has a large passive heatsink that is linked to the Southbridge cooler with a heatpipe, so on the one hand the Southbridge cooler is low profile which leaves space for graphics cards, and on the other the cooler on the Northbridge gets hot. The cooler is fenced in by the processor socket, the top-most graphics card and the nearest module of memory, so there's no obvious route for hot air to escape. ECS has thought about this and supplies a fan which clips to the cooler vertically, but it spins quite fast and emits a steady drone.
There's plenty of capacity for expansion, with six SATA 2 ports that are separated into two groups, again to leave room for the graphics cards. Four of the ports are located near the memory and two are laid down and project from the side of the board. The floppy connector is also laid down but we doubt that you have any intention of using a floppy drive. The single IDE connector is located outboard of the memory and the two power connectors are arranged in ideal locations at the side and top of the board.
On the I/O panel you'll find a pair of PS/2 ports but you can forget about serial and parallel ports. There are six USB 2.0 ports, one Firewire, dual Gigabit LAN and a decent array of connectors for the Realtek ALC885 HD audio. That's six mini jacks and an optical output.
If that's not enough there's a bracket with two more USB and another Firewire port plus an adapter so you can mount the bracket in an external drive bay, while a second bracket carries an eSATA port.
We liked the power and reset micro buttons and the BIOS POST code LED display is welcome, while overclockers will take full advantage of the five fan connectors. They'll also want to use the BIOS to get the maximum advantage out of their processor, but here we have mixed feelings. For one thing ECS doesn't make it easy to update your BIOS, as you don't get a Windows-based flashing utility in the package, nor does it offer a Live feature to check for updates.
The Award BIOS shows some neat touches, though, such as the way that CPU, FSB and PCI-E timings are displayed in two columns so you can see the current values and your proposed settings at a glance. You can have up to four different profiles for timings and voltages.
During our testing we were able to overclock our Core 2 Duo E6700 from its standard 2.67GHz to 3GHz by raising the FSB from 1,066MHz to 1,200MHz. Once we went beyond that point the PC was prone to restarting under heavy load, and that's none too impressive as this processor can run significantly faster on an Intel chipset.
Verdict
By any standards the ECS PN2 SLI2+ is a very expensive motherboard and, while it delivers an impressive list of features, we can't reconcile the price with the minimal overclocking that is on offer.
Company: ECS
Contact: 0870 240 8312
