nForce 590 SLI: Foxconn C51XEM2AA

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 and expanding to IOMeter and an endless loop of Far Cry loop if all is well. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (operating at 2600MHz - 13x200); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS2-6400C3 (using the DDR2-800 divider (DDR2-742 - explained here) in dual channel with 3.0-4-3-9-1T timings); BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC video card (operating at 670/1640MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA 3Gbps hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 91.28.

Motherboards:

• Foxconn C51XEM2AA (nForce 590 SLI);
  
• ATI 'Sturgeon' reference board (CrossFire Xpress 3200 AM2).

AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (operating at 2600MHz - 13x200); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS-4000 Pro (operating in dual at 400MHz with 2.0-3-2-7-1T timings); BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC video card (operating at 670/1640MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA 3Gbps hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 600W (ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe) & Antec NeoHE 550W (DFI CFX3200-DR) power supply units; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 91.28.

Motherboards:

• ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce 4 SLI x16);
  
• DFI LANParty UT CFX3200-DR (CrossFire Xpress 3200).

Test notes:

Due to some memory address issues with our ATI 'Sturgeon' reference CrossFire Xpress 3200 AM2 motherboard, we were unable to use the board in CrossFire mode when 2 x 1GB memory modules were installed and operating in dual channel mode. However, we were able to complete a full suite of comparison benchmarks with a single GeForce 7900 GTX installed, and the board worked fine with a single Radeon X1900XTX installed.

As soon as we installed a pair of Radeon X1900's for CrossFire, we encountered a number of issues. However, with retail RD580/SB600 motherboards on the way, we will leave our examination of the AM2 version of ATI's CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset when those boards arrive in our labs. As a result of the problems that we have, please bare in mind that the BIOS is not 100% bug free, so there may be more performance to unlock in shipping CrossFire Xpress 3200 AM2 implementations.

In order to attain our SLI Memory results, we installed an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and a matched pair of 1GB Corsair XMS2-8500 modules. We then enabled SLI Memory and recorded all settings used by the modules when SLI Memory is turned on. We then ran our suite of benchmarks on the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and then installed the Athlon 64 FX-62 again, clocking it to 2600MHz forcing the settings used by the X2 5000+ and then re-running our benchmark suite.

We found that the differences in performance between the two processors was the same as what we had experienced in our Socket AM2 review of the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and FX-62 processors, so we were happy that our method of attaining comparable SLI Memory results worked as it would when used normally. There are a wide range of options to test with SLI Memory, and the speed attained will also depend on the CPU installed. We've only touched the surface here and we'll have to examine SLI Memory a bit closer when we've got a wider range of CPUs available to us.