Abit KN9 SLI

Richard's Thoughts:

The KN9 SLI is a dream for someone with OCD, considering the absoulte regular and square placements of all the principle pins and connectors on the board. In a way it adds to the boards appeal of clean, crisp aesthetics.

If you are SLI-ing with two dual slot cards you will be only able to use a single PCI and PCI-Express x1 slot. There are also some problems with SLI performance in Half-Life 2: Episode One. We've tried to get to the bottom of the problem, but there doesn't seem to be an answer to the rather weird issue we have encountered - the other nForce 570 SLI boards we have tested have all worked fine in Episode One.

Both of these issues are a little frustrating for different reasons. There is no onboard wireless networking, so those wanting to use wireless networking will either have to use the one PCI slot that is available, or use a USB wireless adapter. However, be warned that USB performance seems to be a little flakey, depending on the ports you use: another head scratching issue we couldn't understand the cause of. The lack of SLI performance in some games is also frustrating, because performance is not consistent in games that we know have SLI profiles. We have done three different Windows installations on this board and trawled through several BIOS revisions with a fine tooth comb, but none of them solved all of the issues we were having.

Since the board is based on the nForce 570 SLI MCP, NVIDIA's performance mainstream option, it's understandable that people considering purchasing it don't have the disposible income to go all out and buy the latest equipment and peripherals. In fact, we feel that they will probably still own a fair amount of legacy hardware like parallel port printers or serial LCD/VFD units amongst other things.

This means that the lack of legacy serial/parallel ports - because of the large gap in the rear I/O panel for OTES air exhaust - could pose a problem for more potential buyers than if this had been based on the more expensive nForce 590 SLI chipset. It's a shame our board didn't come with the optical input as well despite the solder points being there for it, and it doesn't seem as if the ones you can buy off the shelf have it either.

Having said that, if it fits your needs; for example, if you are just starting your computer building experience or you just won't use anything legacy then fine. Afterall, USB printers have been exclusive to the market for a while now and USB keyboard and mice cost but a few bob (that's very little for those not familiar with Britishisms).

Initially we had some problems with early BIOS revisions that have serious post hang issues prior to the v1.3 BIOS with both of the CPUs we tested. However, once we'd flashed to the 1.3 BIOS, we had no trouble and the board hard/soft booted without issue. But over the last month of using this board we've now been through at least three BIOS revisions and it's solved the serious problems but we just seem to keep finding more problems.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't just an issue with Abit's motherboards, because plenty of boards need initial bugs ironing out through BIOS updates. The board has been out for some time now and we are still finding issues with it in gaming and overclocking. This isn't really something we find at all acceptable and it is certainly not something we could recommend or would ever put up with as a consumer.

On the whole, the Abit KN9 SLI looks good, but looks are certainly not everything in this case. It's a real shame, because the layout is one of the best we've seen. However, when you start to scratch the surface, the KN9 SLI is not a product we can really recommend.

Tim's Thoughts:

I am really not sure how Abit managed to release this board with such serious BIOS issues. Thankfully, the latest BIOS fixes most of the serious problems, but it doesn't fix all of them - the KN9 SLI simply isn't bullet proof in its current state. This was further highlighted when we ran the bit-tech stress test.

If you're not familiar with this, we subject the board to two instances of Prime 95, an instance of IOMeter and a Far Cry time demo looping at 1600x1200 4xAA 8xAF. The first time we ran the test, one of the Prime 95 instances threw up errors after just under 16 hours 40 minutes. Every other part of the test continued running for the full 24 hour test period. We then ran the test again, to check that what we were experiencing was consistent. Again, the board failed one of the two Prime 95 instances after 16 hours. The board isn't bad on the stability front and it is certainly not unstable - it's just not as stable as we would expect an Abit motherboard to be.

We also had problems getting the board to accept the BIOS settings we use for our testing. Instead of just setting the memory to 3-3-3-9-1T with 2.2V, we had to take the board there incrementally - it wouldn't go straight to the timings we were finally able to get to after a bit of TLC.

While overclocking was a reasonably fruitful experience on the board, we found that we had to take our time and slowly increase speeds to get the board stable at higher bus clocks - the board was also fussy at some clocks on our way to finding the maximum attainable clocks. It certainly wasn't a straight forward experience. We achieved a max front side bus of 300MHz using the 8.0x multiplier and a 3.0x LDT setting. The highest we could get the CPU stable at was 10.5x285 with 1.55V vCore. From what we understand, the board doesn't have a working PCI lock at the moment, so it's something to bear in mind if you've got sound cards and hard drives that are sensitive to higher PCI bus speeds.

Rounding Up...

All in all, the KN9 SLI is a great looking board that lacks that cutting edge to make it worthy of a recommendation. Our time using the board has been quite painful and it was far from problem free. Even with the latest BIOS, there are still some outstanding issues and it is not as solid as we have come to expect Abit boards to be. Considering that there are other boards on the market that don't come with the myriad of problems we've encountered, we recommend giving the KN9 SLI a miss for the time being.

Update 21:00 GMT 25/08/06:

We were informed that there was a newer version of the BIOS released on the weekend that we finalised our testing. Unfortunately, we were not informed of this until today. The 1.4 BIOS promised to fix many of the issues we had; however, on further testing of the board this evening we can say that although some of the issues are fixed, there are a whole host of new issues. Here is a summary of our lab notes from our initial testing of the updated BIOS this evening:

• After setting known working memory timings and voltages in BIOS, the board would sometimes fail to POST;
  
• Random lockups in Windows when enabling SLI on a pair of GeForce 7900 GTs with the 'fixed' 91.33 driver;
  
• Boot time into fresh Windows XP install increased by over 50%

It looks like the KN9 SLI has some fundamental problems that are not going to be fixed with a BIOS update. We can only recommend staying away from this board, unless you enjoy the headaches and frustrations created by constant BIOS updates that fix some problems at the same time as creating a bunch more.

To be fair to Abit, the BIOS engineers have worked hard to try and fix the problems with this board, but after starting our testing on the 15th of July, we have been through four BIOS revisions and there is stil no light at the end of the tunnel. We think that the problems lie in the hardware itself, so they are not going to disappear overnight.