The ECS KN3SLI is based on the Nvidia 590SLI, an AMD platform offering very good overclocking. ECS has also mentioned in an official press release the superb overclocking capabilities, so we were eager to see how this motherboard would perform, especially compared with the other two in this review.

First of all, ECS doesn't provide a utility to use for overclocking the board. Nothing to worry about however, we will use Nvidia's nTune:

But just as with the Asus M2N32WS Pro, nTune also doesn't fully support the ECS KN3SLI2. You cannot set the CPU/DRAM voltages. We then tried to find the maximum FSB for our CPU (AMD Athlon X2 4600+). To our disappointment, the system hung when nTune tried to increase the FSB and test the overclocking stability. Therefore, you have to rely on the BIOS manual settings and find exactly how far you can overclock your CPU.

After carefully looking at the BIOS settings, we noticed that the overclocking settings were much lower than what we had seen with the Asus and Foxconn motherboards. For example, there is no option to lock the PCI-E at any specific clock frequency (usually 100MHz). We proceeded with our tests and by lowering the CPU multiplier, we were able to boot at 236FSB. However, the system was very unstable (default CPU voltage).

By lowering the FSB we reached 216, which can be considered a rather low number for an 590SLI motherboard: