The packaging of the Abit KN9-SLI is common for motherboards, a typical well designed cardboard box. While the box itself is not extraordinary, the KN9-SLI came with the richest bundle in the review. With regards to cabling, there are typical IDE and SATA cables, as well as a back panel which provides USB and Firewire ports. Furthermore, there is an SLI connector card and an SLI retention bracket, since this motherboard supports SLI as well. Besides the driver CD, Abit is once more the only company to provide floppy diskettes with the RAID controller drivers. These diskettes are a must for users who are building a new system and want to run a RAID array, so we find it strange that Abit is the only company sensible enough to include them in the package.

Finally, Abit includes a high quality mousepad in the package as well, which has nothing to do with the motherboard of course but adds value to the whole offering. The manual and the quick user guide are written in 5 languages and are thorough enough for users of any experience level to understand. Our only complaint could be the included IDE/floppy cables, as round cables could be considered a necessity nowadays.

The Abit KN9-SLI is built on an ATX sized bright red PCB, common for most high end Abit motherboards. Bright red is Abit’s preferred colour. We couldn’t find any major layout flaws on the Abit K9N-SLI; actually it has one of the cleanest, most well designed layouts we have seen. All of the SATA, on-board USB and Firewire connectors are grouped together and kept near the motherboard edges. The clear CMOS jumper is placed at the lowest end of the motherboard, providing easy access. The chipset cooler is connected with the large MOSFET heatsink near the back panel of the motherboard via a heatpipe, so the air pressure created by the CPU cooler exhausts the heat to the rear of the case. The cooling capabilities of this system are good but if you want to improve them, the chipset heatsink is placed between the two PCI-E 16X slots, but it is not interfering with them so the change with a tall aftermarket heatsink is possible if your VGA cards do not have very large coolers.

Our worry is only that the RAM slots, (which are far away from the PCI-E slot but near the CPU socket) could cause trouble if the four of them are populated and you want to use an excessively large heatsink. You will also not find any parallel or serial port at the back panel of the motherboard. They were traded with exhaust vents for the OTES system, which is common for high end Abit motherboards.

Abit chose a common Award BIOS for the KN9-SLI. The KN9-SLI also has no uGuru panel features. The range of overclocking settings of the Abit KN9-SLI is certainly rich enough in that you can adjust the CPU voltage up to 2.1V and the DDR voltage up to 2.3V, but you can also adjust the DDR ref voltage. The MCP55P and Hypertransport voltages can be adjusted up to 1.4V, which may aid high HTT overclocks slightly.

You can also adjust a load of DDR-2 options and timings, which will leave enthusiasts with a lot of combinations to experiment with. The health monitoring screen is very thorough and displays readings for 3 temperatures, 4 fans and most voltage lines across the motherboard.