AM2 MBO Round-up: Part I - EPoX AF590SLI2 Optimus
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 03 Dec 2006

EPoX AF590SLI2 OPTIMUS

I believe that the million dolar question here is - what's going on with EPoX in the past couple of months? They've been pretty silent about everything, so I just gave them a "ping" last week to see if there are any interesting products to review. They've sent this motherboard and, boy, was I pleasantly surprised. Being a long-time obsessive EPoX user, I had certain expectations that were not so small after months of silence from EPoX.
Although we didn't receive this motherboard in it's absolutely beautiful original box, that didn't really have an affect on our smile after we took the box out. First of all - color games. Red, orange, black, yellow and blue, with a tiny bit of purple. And very stylish and nice chipset cooler, as well. Although it seems that Picasso would have a field day looking at this one, I actually think it looks awesome. There's four DDR-2 memory slots, 2xPCI-E x16, 2xPCI-E x1, and two PCI slots, as well as two IDE, one floppy and six Serial ATA connectors. Just about everything you might ever think of.

We like this cooling solution for more then one single reason (being all-together cooling solution) - it also looks really mean, awesome, whatever you might want to call it. The rest of the layout is really driven by usual design rules and these crazy colours EPoX picked for various things on the motherboard.

Of course, a quick intro to our testing system - for this roundup, we're using:
- CPU: AMD Athlon X2 64 4000+ for Socket AM2
- MEM: OCZ DDR2 1000 XTC running at DDR2-800@4-4-4-12
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 7900GTX
- HDD: WD Raptor 150GB
- PSU: OCZ PowerStream 600W