A full featured motherboard with plenty of power, the Abit KN9S is great motherboard for anyone needing to replace or upgrade their system. Equipped with an AMD socket AM2, suitable for Athlon 64 processors, including the X2 and FX series, the KN9S is more than capable of handling anything you may want to run. Using the Nvidia nForce 550 chipset the KN9S supports up to 8GB of DDR2 memory for supreme power. It also includes a gigabit Ethernet port, 7.1 channel onboard sound, and 4 SATA ports.
Thanks to those 4 ports, you can add multiple hard drives to the system, and the KN9S supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, and JBOD. For your expansion needs the KN9S has multiple expansion slots to use including one x16, and three x1 PCIe slots, plus an additional 2 PCI slots. Build a powerful system; the Abit KN9S is a solid foundation.
AMD Socket AM2This motherboard supports AMD's Socket AM2-based CPUs, including the Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 series. With a 2000MHz system bus using Hyper Transport Technology and support for dual-channel DDR2 RAM, AM2 motherboards form the basis for phenomenal system performance.
NVIDIA nForce 550 MCP for Mainstream UsersNVIDIA nForce 550 MCPs deliver outstanding quality and performance to casual PC users, gamers and business users alike with advanced SATA 3Gb/s RAID and High Definition Audio features.
Gigabit Ethernet ConnectivityThe ABIT KN9S features a fast Gigabit network interface for high-speed LAN connections at up to 1000Mb/s data transfer rates. Gigabit LAN is ideal for supercharged seamless streaming of Internet audio and video content.
SATA II with RAID SupportThe second generation SATA interface delivers up to 300MB/sec transfer speed, doubling that of the first generation Serial ATA. Four 3Gb/s SATA II ports support RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 0+1 for better performance and enhanced data security.
PCI Express x16 Graphics InterfaceThe latest PCI Express x16 graphics interface delivers over 3.5 times the bandwidth of AGP 8X to support the latest high-performance graphics cards.
Silent OTES CoolingThe Silent OTES cooling solution keeps the chipset and MOSFETs cool with the latest heatpipe technology. Heatpipes do without an active fan, cutting down on noise pollution from your case and enhancing the stability of components on your motherboard.
Pros: Excellent and pleasing to navigate full featured bios.highly stable and responsive in the hands of a compitent builder.
Cons: newbie builders posing as hardware enthusiasts bashing this board in thier reviews because of what is clearly user errors.but then again that probably drove the boards price down making it a steal for someone compitent enough to use it,so maybe thats more of a pro than a con eh?
Overall Review: board gave no arguements towards a 65w 1.25v am2 x2 even with out of box bios(which is 1.3 btw).i have to say it makes me sick to read of people that would rather rma a motherboard and call it broke rather than at the most flashing the bios or setting the correct voltage for the ddr2 memory. if your ddr2 is default outside of 1.8v you need to set it to the correct value because no board will do it for you unless the board defaults at an incorrect jedec voltage value.because the truth is, this board is just awesome, and i even left my x-fi out of this build because i tried the onboard HD audio with the latest hd audio driver from realteks site, and was strangely impressed by it so i kept it.so if your looking for a non sli nforce5 for your 8800 and your am2 try this one out, itll give back more than you put into it for sure.