Don’t Bother With The Abit KN9 SLI

Ξ August 26th, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |

The Abit KN9 SLI sucks ass. Hardocp got it right but Hex dot us obviously live in some parallel dot dimension where Abit AM2 boards actually work. After wasting epochs of man hours working with revision after revision BIOS’, and even after publishing the article we were informed of yet another BIOS revision (1.4) which inevitably turned into another frustrating experience.

Even after 1.4’s apparent “complete overhaul” booting into windows turned into a labour some experience. The system would just hang after an already drawn out windows loading screen followed by a further 2 minutes of blank screen before finally getting into the OS sometime around a midnight in 2010. If it didn’t lockup within 2 minutes of being in the OS it would reboot itself, then for some divine intervention it was stable and I did manage to get the 91.33 drivers installed, and the 7900GTs in SLI, I realised I had to reboot and set the memory from 5-5-5-23-2T to 3-3-3-9-1T @ 2.3V, which we know works, it would sometimes work fine and POST but other times it couldn’t be bothered. At least that’s 50% better than always hanging with pre-1.4 BIOS if you try to do too much at once, without the gentle coaxing like encouraging a newborn to walk before it runs.
It’s a perfect experience of pure frustration that I wouldn’t wish on anybody. In “my professional opinion” it really requires a whole new board revision, from the ground up, rather than trying to put plasters on a haemorrhaging wound. I feel sorry for Abit’s BIOS engineers. You can’t polish a turd.

Tim (Smalley) assures me that the AN832-SLI was pretty decent, but I never used it, (edit: So was the KN8-SLI which I reviewed even. That was a decent board!) and we recently had to send back a Fatality AN9 because it was part of a mass recall so it doesn’t look too promising for Abit’s AMD motherboard division. Their Intel boards are generally rock solid though; I still use a AW8-MAX (955X) which I love to bits, and have a AW8-D (975X) spare, but it has those nasty PCI-Express lanes at the expense of PCI slots which I can’t yet afford to sacrifice. We aren’t going to review their AW8-D either, simply because there’s no point as it doesn’t support Conroe. I mean, by the time we would get around to doing it no one in their sane mind would ever consider buying an end of line P4 now Core 2s are widely available.

In other news; I feel sorry for those holding out for the 590SLI Intel boards. Haaahahaha! It was meant to be released three weeks ago but the red company put it back and back.. and now back again, deciding to release the 570SLI Intel chispet instead. So next week we should have a rather “basic” (for lack of a better word) Asus 570 SLI Conroe board review done. That is, providing them reds dont change their minds again. Actually, why the fuck am I laughing?? I should be pissed off at the fact I wrote three quarters of a 590SLI Intel review 3 weeks ago to have them change their mind the day before the NDA was up. After we (and no doubt every other review site) put all the effort in for testing. Bastards.