DFI LANParty UT NF590 SLI-M2R/G

Richard's Thoughts...

The DFI NF590 SLI-M2R/G is undoubtedly a great board, and is successfully aimed at the high end enthusiast market. It makes no apologies that it has the potential to kill any component you use in your system, but rightly assumes people who buy the board will know what they are doing. Incidentally it's the same story with stability: it can offer a kick ass tweak fest experience to really eek the last drop of performance out of your system or it can crash randomly and be a bit of a nightmare if you don't know what to try and fiddle with. We found the standard settings a little too overzealous but turning them down slightly, whilst maintaining tightly timed DDR2 worked fantastically.

I love the fact this board has three PCI slots. Whilst one will go if dual slot graphics cards are used in SLI, two free PCI slots are still better than what most other boards will offer from the outset. The inclusion of an x8 slot means you can even use third party RAID cards as well as SLI in the system should you need more than the eight SATA 2 ports available, or something more professional than nForce 590 SLI's software RAID5.

The package is slightly lacking, but the effort put into the motherboard more than makes up for it. Considering enthusiasts in the market for this board will upgrade more than most it's highly likely that they will have at least a box full of components and cables to use already.

The Karajan audio module is a far neater solution than Abit's AudioMAX daughterboard and doesn't use up a space for a PCI slot. Also, including the Realtek ALC885 means it's capable of onboard playback for protected content as well as being the highest fidelity codec Realtek has to offer. Not that you'd ever have to use it with a wealth of PCI slots available though. Well, you might considering the price...

The cheapest price we found was £144 plus delivery on Aria, which is certainly expensive but not as bad as some of DFI's previous boards have been. In the grand scale of things there are a few boards like the Asus M2N32-SLI we previously reviewed, the Gigabyte GA59SLI-S5 or MSI K9N Diamond that come in some £10 cheaper, but there's also other Asus boards like the Crosshair or M2N32 WS Pro that are a lot more expensive.

Being pretty much slap bang in the middle but offering such a wealth of features gives the DFI a great edge between other nForce 590 SLI boards. Considering that the nForce 680a SLI chipset will be only available for AMD's 4x4 boards you'd be hard pressed to find a better place to plug in your socket AM2 chip into.

Tim's Thoughts...

Apart from our initial stability problems with the LANParty UT NF590 SLI-M2R/G, the board has generally been a joy to work with. At a first sight, many of the BIOS options will be daunting for anyone that isn't keyed right into the intricate world of fine tuning memory timings. With that said though, DFI has done a pretty good job of burying a lot of the overzealous tweaking options in sub menus, making the BIOS reasonably accessible to the novice. However, because the BIOS is set up incredibly aggressively by default, you're probably going to have to tweak the drive strength settings in order to get the board stable from the outset.

Once we got the board stable though, we didn't look back. We subjected the board to our usual stress test. For those not familiar with the process, we run a pair of Prime 95 instances, an instance of IOMeter and also Far Cry looping in the foreground at 1600x1200 4xAA 8xAF with a pair of GeForce 7900 GTX cards running in SLI mode on an SLI-Ready motherboard. The stress test is designed to stress all components of the system. We returned to the system some 37 hours later and the board was still going strong without so much as a blip - no errors had been thrown up by any of the running programmes during the stress test.

Moving on to overclocking, it's a tricky affair for anyone that's not familiar with the multitude of options available. After some tweaking, we got the board running swimmingly at a 330MHz HTT clock using the 8x multiplier on our Athlon 64 X2 5000+, resulting in a slight overclock to 2640MHz. To achieve this, we set the CPU-C51 HTT multiplier to 3x and then set the CPU voltage to 1.4000V, C51 NB Core Voltage to 1.44V, CPU/C51 HT Voltage to 1.45V and DRAM Voltage to 2.29V.

The LANParty UT NF590 SLI-M2R/G didn't yield the best overclocking experience we've had from a socket AM2 motherboard, but it was certainly no slouch. The board's overclocking capabilities should be more than enough to cater for most enthusiasts, even those using a CPU with a lower multiplier.

Final Thoughts...

DFI's LANParty UT NF590 SLI-M2R/G is a superb motherboard that is aimed at experienced overclockers and enthusiasts looking to fine tune their system with what is possibly the most comprehensive BIOS we've used to date - even besting the incredible BIOS on the CFX3200-DR. It's a close call between this and the Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe WiFi Edition for the best AM2 motherboard we've reviewed to date, and the decision is going to come down to personal preference.

The NF590 SLI-M2R/G isn't one for novices in its current state, due to the over-aggressive default BIOS configuration, but we think it's the one to get if you're an experienced enthusiast. If you have a seizure when you look at the memory timings configuration page in the BIOS, we'd recommend the M2N32-SLI Deluxe - it does a better job of hiding most memory timings and is generally easier to get on with if you're a novice.