ECS PN2 SLI2+ has lots of features, like six SATA-300 ports featuring eSATA and RAID support, dual Gigabit LAN, three PCI Express x16 slots, a POST diagnostics display, FireWire ports and several overclocking options.
The audio section from this motherboard is one of its best features, providing a 101 dB signal-to-noise ratio for its inputs and a 106 dB signal-to-noise ratio for its outputs. Several motherboards provide a high SNR on the outputs but a low SNR on the inputs, which isn’t the case with this product. This means that you can use its on-board audio for professional applications, like capturing and editing analog audio. It also provides a sampling rate of up to 192 kHz for both inputs and outputs, and several motherboards provide a high sampling rate for its outputs (192 kHz) but usually a lower maximum sampling rate for its inputs (e.g., 96 kHz). Once again, this isn’t the case with this motherboard. This board also provides one optical SPDIF output soldered directly on the motherboard, which is great as you can easily connect it to your home theater receiver.
It also supports the new 1,333 MHz FSB that will be used by newer Core 2 Duo processors and also supports memories up to DDR2-1200/PC2-9600, making this platform a great option if you are into overclocking.
So if you buy this motherboard today you won’t have any trouble in upgrading your CPU for a newer model in the future.
The only problem we see with this product is its price. Costing around USD 260 this board is simply too expensive for the average user. Its price, however, is in the same price level as other nForce 680i ”designed by NVIDIA“ motherboards. The problem is that its main direct competitor, ASUS P5N32-E SLI, costs a lot less – you can find it around USD 200 or even less. Also based on nForce 680i and having the same basic features as ECS PN2 SLI2+, we think this model from ASUS is ”the“ pick for someone looking for a very high-end nForce 680i-based motherboard, even though we couldn’t include it on our performance comparison.
But frankly we think that there are several other motherboards on the market today that provides a better cost/benefit ratio – if you are not looking for so many extra features, of course. For example, if you are worried about the new 1,333 MHz FSB and want DDR2-1066 support you can buy a motherboard based on the new Intel P35 chipset. We included two models from MSI and they not only achieved a higher performance, but one of them also achieved a higher overclocking (keep in mind that we didn’t play with advanced overclocking adjustments so you may achieve a better overclocking with ECS PN2 SLI2+ than we did).
Of course buying a motherboard that costs half the price won’t give you all features brought by ECS PN2 SLI2+, and buying this board or any nForce 680i-based motherboard only makes sense if you will really use all features it provides and you are really into overclocking to try out all overclocking options this motherboard provides.
