Abit KN9 Ultra

Next to the MCP55 Ultra Chipset are six Serial ATA ports. These Serial ATA ports comply with SATA 2.0 specifications and supports RAID 0/1/0+1/5 JBOD. Beneath these ports are three USB 2.0 headers as well as some additional jumpers. In the corner of the motherboard is the FDD connector and the Winbond W83627EHG Super I/O ASIC. Another Abit innovation with many of their products had been uGuru. Unfortunately the uGuru is absent on the KN9 Ultra. However, the uGuru technology can still be found in the AN9 32X. We personally do not mind the departure of uGuru from the KN9 Ultra, since this technology was not supported under GNU/Linux. The IEEE-1394a Firewire support on the motherboard comes from Texas Instruments with a part number of TSB43AB22A. Two Firewire headers are available on the motherboard. The expansion slots on the KN9 Ultra include one PCI Express x16, three PCI Express x1, and two PCI slots. The KN9 SLI motherboard supports NVIDIA SLI at PCI-E x16 speeds using the NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI Chipset.

Moving onto the CPU socket area is AMD's Socket AM2. Looking around the CPU socket area it is relatively clear of any possible obstructions. There is a row of capacitors on the back side of the CPU socket, but those should remain clear of most heatsinks or water blocks. In the upper left hand corner of the motherboard is the 4-pin ATX12V power connector. The Silent OTES heatsink also is in this corner of the motherboard. The I/O ports consist of two PS/2, one SPDIF out, six audio, two Gigabit LAN, and four USB 2.0 ports.