Motherboard Roundup: 7 Products On NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI (Socket AM2)

Even though the nForce 680a chipset has been launched already, nForce 590 SLI is still the leading chipset for Socket AM2 — in other words, motherboards based on this chipset are the most rigged retail offers (for early March, 2007). Active promotion of nForce 680a and its competitor-to-be from AMD with similar functions, as well as Quad FX on the whole, generally depends on the launch of AMD quad-core processors. They will certainly be more interesting to the target audience of such systems, who is keen on breaking records, than modern dual-core Athlon 64 FX processors of the 70th series. Prices are not important, because the radical philosophy rarely takes into account such a boring factor as the price/performance ratio.


At the same time, nForce 590 SLI-based motherboards are getting more and more practical: initially high prices are going down, and the cost of these functional motherboards has become quite attractive. It goes without saying that there is a point in buying a motherboard with SLI support (especially based on the top chipset) only if you are interested in modern 3D games or if you build a graphical station and need expanded peripheral functionality of this chipset.

If you have a High-End video card (or even a SLI system), you can play games no matter whether you have a processor for $250 or $500. The inverse is also true — if you save on a video card, you'll have to reduce video settings accordingly, regardless of your CPU. Now what concerns the comparison of competing platforms. Equally-priced Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 X2 processors demonstrate similar performance. But if you compare platforms in general, you'll find out that motherboards with nForce 590 SLI-like functions for AMD are always cheaper than those for Intel.

However, we are not going to persuade our readers, we'll test motherboards and draw conclusions. We have tested many nForce 590 SLI-based motherboards. So this article will sum our reviews up. So it's comparision of Asus, Ecs, Foxconn, Gigabyte and Msi motherboards!

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