AM2 MBO Round-up: Part I
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 03 Dec 2006

Since we received quite positive feedback from our readers and partners about the Core 2 Duo motherboard roundup, we decided to go down that road yet again but in different direction - covering AM2 motherboards. We made this nice list of mainstream/high-end motherboards and - here we go, covering them all. For starters, two amazing motherboards that are extremely close in performance - DFI LanParty NF590SLI-M2R/G and EPoX AF590SLI2 OPTIMUS.

DFI LanParty NF590 SLI-M2R/G

This board is a successor to the famous DFI LanParty NF4 Series that were so well received among enthusiasts. Unlike some of the other manufacturers of nForce 590 SLI mobos, DFI waited with launching this board until they were satisfied that performance would be top notch, particularly when it comes to the memory subsystem. The board came to the market a bit later, but with full support for the 1T memory timings.
Other than that, the board builds upon the already excellent layout known from the NF4 Series, with a few minor tweaks here and there. The sleek black PCB is still here, with yellow coloured plastic parts. DFI boards differ from the usual layout by positioning DIMM slots in a backward order, with DIMM 1 being the farthest from the CPU socket. Of note are the copper heatsinks for the chipset, as well as the SATA ports placed on the side of the PCB, so the cables would not collide with the graphics cards in a SLI setup. We welcome the addition of a two-digit diagnostic LED display which was first introduced on the Epox boards. Apart from two x16 PCI Express slots, there is one x4 and one x8 PCI-E slot available, along with three regular PCI. A total of 8 SATA 3G ports are at your disposal, 6 of those are native nForce 5 and two more come with the Sil3132 chip. There is also one IDE connector.
A total of ten USB 2.0 ports (six on the I/O panel) are present. Sound is handled by the Karajan audio 7.1 channel module (Realtek ALC885), with digital S/PDIF in and out, in addition to the analog audio jacks. The list is completed with two Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 connectors, a Fire Wire port and PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard. Since this is a top of the line 590 SLI board, it comes with all the usual Nvidia technologies, such as LinkBoost, DualNet, Teaming, FirstPacket, etc.
The BIOS is state of the art with everything you can possibly wish for, and it is further enhanced with its support for the nTune 5.0 software, so you can access all of its features straight from the Windows OS.