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NVIDIA announced the nForce 5xx series of motherboard chipsets a short month ago to coincide with the release of AMD's AM2 platform. Three new chipsets were announced at that time, the nForce 590 SLI, the nFoce 570 SLI, the nForce 570 Ultra and the nForce 550. The KN9-SLI is based upon NVIDIA's nForce 570 SLI chipset. Key features of the 570 include x8 SLI (each PCI Express slot gets x8 bandwidth when SLI mode is enabled), DualNet, MediaShield and more.  CPU Socket The KN9-SLI motherboard supports all current AMD Athlon 64 Socket 940 AM2 CPUs. I took the liberty of testing a FX-62, a 5000+, a 4600+, a 3800+ Energy Efficient CPU on the new motherboard. All made POST without issue. AMD is liable to stick to the AM2 platform for at least two years for the high-end, making it a good choice. AMD generally doesn't change their platforms without a good reason (the move to DDR2 being the primary one for the move to AM2.  DIMM slots NVIDIA's nForce 570 chipset supports up to 8GB of unbuffered non-ECC DDR2 800MHz memory. The ABIT board comes with 4 DIMM slots. 2 GB sticks are entering the market. If you want to use 8GB you need to use a 64-bit operating system like Windows XP 64-bit or a Linux distribution. 32-bit operating systems can only address 4GB of memory.  PCI slots  PCI Express x1 slots  PCI Express x16  PCI Express x16 slots Expansion on a SLI board is dominated by the two PCI Express x16 slots available. Placement of the other expansion slots is determined in part by the separation of the SLI slots on the board. The KN9-SLI has two PCI Express x16 slots, two PCI Express x1 slots in between them, and two PCI slots on the outside of the second PCI Express x16 slot. The separation between the two PCI Express slots is a little wider than other SLI motherboards necessitating a wider SLI bridge as well. If two-slot video cards are used, the adjacent slot is also covered limiting expansion.  SATA ports  FDC 4 SATA ports are the minimum on a modern motherboard today. The nForce 570 series supports up to 6 SATA drives natively. The ABIT motherboard sports 6 SATA ports. NVIDIA's nForce 570 SLI chipset supports up to 6 drives in a RAID 0 Array. You can also do multiple RAID 1 Arrays; have a drive operate as a backup drive in case an array drive goes bad and more. Legacy drive support is provided by a FDD controller and an IDE controller. Audio Panel    High Definition Audio was introduced in 2004 along with Intel's 925X and 915P/G/M chipsets. NVIDIA was a bit slow on the uptake in adopting the new audio standard but now all NVIDIA motherboards based upon their 5xx series chips support HDA. The AN-9 SLI sports a Realtek ALC883 chip. This is Realtek's latest CODEC supporting 7.1 surround sound, the latest sound APIs and more.  I/O The rear I/O of the board is typical of the legacy-free trend for the rear. No Parallel port or COM port is present. Two GIGABIT LAN RJ45 jacks are present allowing for usage of DualNet and FirstPacket technologies to be utilized by this board. Four USB 2.0 ports are typical for modern motherboards. Contents: 
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