At last, a SLI board using a ULi 1697 chipset for the Socket 754 users. In comparison to some of the NF4 SLI S754 boards out there, the board exhibits interesting ideas which other board makers never thought of. Call it a gimmick or whatsoever, this board not only performs, it also has a lot of features that cost conscious users want. Just like the 2 other boards we reviewed, the 939SLI-eSATA2 and 939SLI32-eSATA2, this board also supports SLI, eSATA2 and AM2 future upgradability. In our previous review of another eSATA2 board, the 775XFire-eSATA2, we have tested and seen the goodness of eSATA2, you can click here to find out the performance levels against the normal USB enclosures.

The board also supports 4 ports of Serial ATA II 3.0Gb/s, RAID 0, 1, 0+1, JBOD and RAID 5, and "Hot Plug" functions, and 2 ATA 133 IDE ports, 2 ports of eSATAII 3.0Gb/s (shared with 2 SATAII ports), support "Hot Plug" function. 5.1 Channel with High Definition Audio, 10/100 Ethernet LAN is supported. The board is also Windows Vista Hardware Ready ROHS compliant.

Performance levels are amazing as we tested it using dual 6600GT against the EPoX SLI board. Installation is quite straightforward for this board. If you need to use SLI, you would have to use the jumper extractor provided in the package. The same applies to installing the AM2 upgrade card,

To run SLI, just insert a pair of NVIDIA SLI cards. With the PowerExpress Engine Enabling Driver and Forcware drivers, SLI works correctly without any issues at all. In SLI mode, we see that games like  Riddick, the performance level did not differ by a lot. For performance of USB and SATA II, you can refer to these USB & SATA II benchmarks of ULi M1697.

In our tests to push for high CLK, we were able to achieve 6 x 340MHz on our 3400+ processor. Voltages used are Vcore-1.55v, Vdimm=2.80, Vchipset=2.10v, ASync mem=DDR266, HT set to 400MHz.

Overall, the board exhibits good feature set especially on the eSATA2, HD Audio,  and AM2 upgradability. The SLI feature is also useful for those who wants to run SLI on it. The only regret is the exclusion of a active heatsink as it is quite warm to touch. This is an affordable board for the S754 users.

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