Although nVidia has already announced the nforce 600 series, we haven’t seen any Teir 1 manufacturers out with their boards yet. ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI are all quoting a few weeks for their boards to be ready and thus, the only solution to run an SLI setup with Intel’s Core 2 CPU is the updated line of nForce 570/590 motherboards. Today, we take a look at one such motherboard from ECS which is labeled as PN1 SLI2.

Packaging
Many people think that ECS only makes cheap products targeted towards the value segment, however, this is not true for their “Extreme” series of motherboards. The PN1-SLI2 is packaged nicely in a thick box that is full of goodies. Starting off, all the bundled cables are RoHS compliant or lead free- and there’s plenty of them.

ECS bundles an external and four internal SATA cables, IDE cables and an RJ45 Network cable. We’re surprised that more manufacturers don’t offer the Network cable as almost all motherboards have a NIC or two onboard. You’re also provided with all the backplates as well as an SLI connector. The included user manual is small but points out all the features and BIOS settings while the bundled CDs have drivers and additional software applications such as the Intervideo suite

Layout
ECS adopts a pretty straightforward design for the layout of their PN1 SLI2 motherboard which is not a bad thing at all. The power connectors are out of the way and the IDE and SATA connectors are placed right where you want them. We would’ve like to see the floppy connector moved closer to the IDE connector, but hey, not many people use the floppy drive nowadays.

There are two x16 PCI Express slots, two x1 and one x2 slots as well as two 32-bit PCI slots. There aren’t many add-on cards that can utilize the x1 slot so we would’ve preferred an additional PCI slot instead. ECS places an additional molex connector onboard recommending its usage an SLI. One thing we found a little strange was the amount of empty space on the backplate- ECS could’ve easily added the parallel port on the back.