HEXUS.reviews :: abit KN9 SLI - nForce 570 SLI

[Steve]

Today it's time for us to take another nForce 570 SLI-based board for a spin. Rather than a K9N, it's a KN9 (now that's going to get confusing)... Abit's KN9 SLI. We'll see how this board fares against several others and see if abit does anything different with nForce 570 SLI compared to MSI. Read on to see how our latest motherboard adventure went.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6150

[ratticon]

Great review.

I have been using this board for a week now and I had the same problem with the latest Nvidia drivers. I was worried it was the two Asus EN7600 GS'es that i'm running in SLi!

If anyone has bumped into problems with this board please share. I've had a few random reboots but nothing serious.

When I first ordered mine I found an incompatibility with Corsair's 2gb (2 x 1gb sticks) ValueSelect kit. After swapping those for Crucial's 1gb (2 x 512mb sticks) Ballistix kit everything works great.

Rat

[kNACKy]

problems with usb devices are related to pci lock
new bios 1.2 don't have pci lock
old bios 1.0 have it
because of this issue all pci devices becomes unstable
and pci card slots don't work too
3 weeks pass since current bios 1.2 and nothing comes out
it's a shame

[ratticon]

problems with usb devices are related to pci lock
new bios 1.2 don't have pci lock
old bios 1.0 have it
because of this issue all pci devices becomes unstable
and pci card slots don't work too
3 weeks pass since current bios 1.2 and nothing comes out
it's a shame

i'm glad that i'm not the only one that has had that problem! I bought a PCI wireless card and although I eventually got it working, the speed of the system had halved. Everything was really noticably slower. I wonder if they will fix this issue in the next bios revision (hoping there is one on the way). I may just downgrade to the 1.0 bios again... although I don't know where I would find it ^_^

Since then I have bought a USB wireless card and the system speed is back to normal. I really hope the PCI issue is fixed soon..

I've noticed as well that my POST doesn't always beep when I power on. The computer works fine and everything POSTs okay, but for some reason it might beep or it might not. Wierd eh?

Rat

[mikesg]

I apologize for re-surfacing the past, but I have this motherboard that I'm working on for a friend and I THOGHT I had the drivers, but it is evident that I don't. I think the pc shipped with the wrong disk and I seemed to have found them about a year ago (the last time I reloaded this machine). Anyway, I can't get the darn network adapters to install. I've tried everything and searched nvidia's site as well as abit. The nvidia 15.23_nforce_winxp32_whql showed the 'Network Adapter' during the extraction process, but after it is done and rebooted, it only shows the 1390 adapter in the device manager. I have spent about 20 hours on this thing trying to get it to install and I've even went as far as loading vista on it and trying the vista drivers from nvidia, but no luck there either, so I've put windows XP Pro back on it. I've also noticed that this POS only shows 3gb of ram when I have 4x 1GB memory cards in the machine.

If anyone can tell me how to get this network adapter installed I'd greatly appreciate it. I have tried to force the driver install by manually selecting it and trying random drivers I've downloaded and no dice. I'm just before pulling everything out of the box, getting a magnifying glass and trying to read every chip in the machine, which doesn't look promising.

Thanks if anyone has any advice.

P.S. If I'm not supposed to bump an old thread like this, please have an admin to move this to its own thread. ??

Thanks in advance! I'm eagerly and humbly waiting for any help I can get.

~~mike~~

[mikesg]

By the way, the name is mike and I'm new to the forums here but not new to computers. I found the issue. After I began the install, the owner of the PC was playing with the bios settings and disabled the onboard lan.... again. I had to smack him.

Why only 3 gigs of memory? This machine has never shown 4 gigs.

[BUFF]

only shows 3 Gbs in BIOS or in Windows?
In both cases it'll be down to addressing limits.

P.S. this probably would have been better in the abit.care section.

[mikesg]

Thanks.

After mixing the Crucial memory around and trying all four sticks in four different slots randomly... it seems that after 2 years, we finally got this thing to yield a beep code. I tried pulling out each stick and reposting each time. This is very strange, but, the stick I finally narrowed it down to would only provide beep codes if it was stuck in the first memory slot. Plugging it in to any other memory slot would allow the machine to boot normally, still showing only 3 gb of memory. If I put only TWO sticks of memory in the machine with a good stick in the first slot and the bad stick in the second, it would only show one GB of memory but no beeps. Swapping the two sticks in the respective slots would not post. I would have assumed that this stick would have prevented a boot altogether, but it's very weird.

The memory sticks are all crucial pc 6400 so I had a 1gb stick of pc5300 lying around so I tried it and whaddya know, it is showing four gb in the bios and the OS also shows all four gigs. Crucial, luckily, has a lifetime warranty so the owner is going to try and have it RMA'd. Thanks for your help.

~~mike~~