Abit KN9 SLI

There are no legacy ports on the rear I/O panel, so if you need parallel or serial ports you'll have to buy an add-in card or look elsewhere. Instead Abit has left a big gap for air exhaust from the OTES which only has an optical out in front of it. Curiously, the optical in solder points are there but no connector was installed. Other ports include standard PS/2 ports, four USB 2.0 ports in a 2x2 orientation with two Gigabit Ethernet sockets on top. Finally the 8-channel surround sound is provided by six 3.5mm jacks.

BIOS:

Abit use a standard Phoenix Award BIOS with the Softmenu in the top left and the Advanced Chipset Features just under it being where the interesting stuff lies. We used revision 1.3 for all of our testing.


SoftMenu

• CPU Clock adjustable from 200-400MHz - in 1MHz increments;
  
• Multiplier from 4x to CPU Max;
  
• PCI-Express Frequency adjustable from 100-145MHz in 1MHz increments;
  
• Processor Voltage - CPU vCore from 1.40V to CPU Max (2.10V) in 0.025V increments;
  
• DDR2 Voltage - Memory Voltage 1.80 to 2.10V in 0.05V increments and 2.20V to 2.30V in 0.1 increments;
  
• DDR2 Reference Voltage - -60mV, -30mV, Default, -30mV;
  
• MCP Voltage - 1.2 to 1.4 in 0.05V increments;
  
• HTT Voltage - 1.2 to 1.4 in 0.05V increments;

Advanced Chipset Features:

• Memory clock adjustments: Auto, 400MHz, 533MHz, 667MHz, 800MHz (memory speed is derrived from the CPU clock on Athlon 64);
  
• HTT Divider: Auto, 200MHz, 400MHz, 600MHz, 800MHz, 1000MHz;
  
• Memory Timings: CAS Latency, tWtR, tRFC, tWR, tRTP, tRAS, tRP, tRC, tRCD, tRRD, Bank Interleaving and Command Rate;

For an nForce 570 SLI board, which is meant to be in the performance mainstream sector, the overclocking options offered are pretty decent; voltages and clocks have a large variance to play with and Abit's Softmenu is easy to navigate and use. The options are also comprehensive, with plenty of adjustments for memory timings and less important items like MCP and HTT voltages are even catered for.

Every BIOS we tested up to and including version 1.2 were giving us some serious POST issues. We were unable to get the motherboard to POST consistently - occasionally, the board would just hang before detecting the CPU and memory. This happened with both an X2 5000+ and an FX-62. Revision 1.3 solved these problems, but it is crazy to think that the board made it out of Abit's Q.A. facility with a BIOS that had some serious flaws. We did however run Ethernet installation problems with the nForce 9.16 standalone drivers for nForce 570 SLI. The board would just reset itself when trying to run the installer. This was overcome but manually installing the Ethernet drivers from system properties in control panel.