AMD AM2 motherboard roundup

Clive Webster | Sep 14, 2006 11:01 AM
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Upgrade to an AM2 Athlon 64 system now
With promises of 35W Athlon 64 desktop CPUs, RAM speeds of up to 1066MHz and the awesome FX-62, the new socket from AMD should appeal to everyone. And with prices ranging from $120 to $339, there’s a board here to cover every pocket. AM2 isn’t just about the theoretical performance boosts of switching to DDR2 RAM; it’s the new socket for all AMD CPUs for the next two years or so - from the AM2 Sempron 3000+ for $120 up to the Athlon 64 FX-62 for more than $1500.

If you’re on a budget, the ECS RS485M-M is a good start. It’s the only board here that doesn’t sport one of NVIDIA’s new Nforce 500-series chipsets, instead plumping for ATi’s Xpress 1100. Strictly speaking, this is a mobile chipset, with power saving its main focus. The RS485M-M may lack features, with only two RAM sockets and no FireWire support, but it’s got a 300MHz Radeon X300 GPU, giving you enough power for Vista’s Premium Aero Glass interface. However, you do get an ageing AC97 audio codec and minimal bundle. Still, being microATX, it can form the basis of a small system.

The rest of the boards use either the high-end Nforce 590 or 570 chipsets. One such example is the MSI K9N SLI Platinum, which also comes with a generous bundle. Even with an early BIOS, performance was excellent - just like all the Nforce boards - and the layout is pleasingly logical. The three PCI and two PCI Express 1x slots offer good expandability, both now and for the future. With the six SATA ports, there’s plenty of storage potential, especially with the new version of MediaShield. The sensible arrangement of ATX power connectors makes for a tidy case too, while you have a FireWire and three USB headers along the bottom for extra ports and expansion. It’s an attractively-priced, well-featured and high-performance board that deserves the runner-up award this month.

Unfortunately, that’s to the detriment of the Abit K9N SLI and Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4, both of which are light on extras while being only slightly cheaper. Judged on board layout alone, there isn’t much to hold either back, so if the prices drop further, have a look. Both arrange the two power connectors to the top and right for tidy case internals, and all the drive connectors are sensibly placed on the right near your drive bays.

However, there are only two PCI slots on both, and the Abit has only two PCI Express slots to the Gigabyte’s three. Gigabyte’s backplane also offers serial, parallel and coaxial S/PDIF ports.

The Foxconn C51XEM2AA, built to NVIDIA’s reference design, offers FirstPacket, DualNet and MediaShield. It’s also the only board here to employ active cooling for the chipset. The layout has eccentricities, but is generally good. The 24-pin ATX power connector is at the top right, with the six SATA and one parallel/ATA connection. The FireWire and two USB headers are accessibly arranged along the bottom. At the back, you’ll find six USB 2 ports as well as one each for FireWire 400 and 800. However, there’s only one fan header. The slot arrangement is also odd, with two PCI, one PCI Express 1x, plus an unusual PCI Express 4x slot present.

The Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe board also has a PCI Express 4x slot, leaving room for only two PCI and one PCI Express. However, there are plenty of integrated devices, the headline being a 802-11a/b/g mini-card on the backplane. This is one of the fullest here with an external SATA data connection (but no power), plus FireWire, four USB 2 and two Gigabit Ethernet connections.

Asus uses the higher-end Nforce 590 chipset, so you get dual PCI Express 16x graphics slots, although not all of the features listed to the right are present in the current BIOS. There’s no DualNet or FirstPacket, for example, which is a shame. However, Asus compensates for this with its own AI Net 2, which offers the same teaming and fail-over capabilities. It also goes one better than the rest of the audio codecs on offer, using a SoundMAX ADI AD1988B chip, which is Vista Premium compliant. This can be coupled with the dual microphone also bundled. Our only criticism is the awkward placing of the four-pin 12V power connector, but with such speed and features on offer it’s our choice of the current crop of boards. Nforce 500 series

While AM2 doesn’t specifically need a new chipset, its release coincides with the launch of NVIDIA’s new core logic, the Nforce 500 series. There are four versions: the dual 16x SLI graphics Nforce 590; dual 8x SLI graphics 570 SLI; single graphics 570 Ultra; and the entry-level 550. This follows a similar pattern to the Nforce4 series, but there are some new features on offer.

NVIDIA claims the hardware firewall of Nforce4 will be rendered unnecessary by Windows Vista’s improved version, and so decided to drop it. In its place are some new networking technologies to complement the twin Gigabit Ethernet connections from the 590 and both 570 chipsets.

FirstPacket can prioritise certain network traffic, aiming to improve responsiveness for time-sensitive apps like online gaming and VoIP. You tell FirstPacket which application to prioritise and its packets will be sent over those of other time-tolerant apps. However, it can only control outbound traffic, so will only be of benefit if you regularly saturate your broadband link with file sharing or similar.

NVIDIA is keen to push the automatic overclocking abilities of Nforce 590 with LinkBoost and SLI-Ready Memory. The first pushes up the HyperTransport and PCI Express bus frequencies by 25 percent, giving 10GB/s bandwidth instead of 8GB/s. In normal use, though, neither bus is likely to approach saturation.

Confusingly, SLI-Ready Memory has nothing to do with SLI, or even with graphics cards. It’s DDR2 system RAM that has a unique overclocking profile stored on it. With the BIOS set to read this, it should give a safe overclock to near the RAM’s maximum frequency without you needing to do anything. It can even overclock the CPU to match the higher RAM frequencies. Unfortunately, even at the lowest automatic overclock setting, our Foxconn board became unstable.

MediaShield – the Nforce storage controller – is still present and can now support six SATA 2 connections. This gives access to massive RAID5 arrays, or to any combination of conventional three-disk RAID0, 1, 0+1 and three-disk RAID5 arrays. But while MediaShield is missing on the Nforce 550 chipset, it does support a HD audio codec just like the rest. And as we’ve seen in the test , it lacks none of the speed of Nforce4.

 ChipsetBenchmark scoreSlotsRAM SocketsAudioI/O BlockHeadersDrive connectionsBundle
ABITNvidia Nforce 5701.282 PCI-E 16x, 2 PCI-E 1x, 2 PCI48-channel High definition4 x USB 2, 2 x Gigabit Ethernet, digital S/PDIF3 x USB 2, 2 x FireWire, 3 x fan6 x SATA2, 1 x PATA, floppyCables: SLI connector
ASUSNvidia Nforce 5901.292 PCI-E 16x, 1 PCI-E 1x, 1 PCI-E 4x, 2 PCI48-channel High Definition4 x USB 2, 2 x Gigabit Ethernet, optical and digital S/PDIF, serial, FireWire, SATA, Wi-Fi2 x USB 2, FireWire, 6 x fan, parallel7 x SATA2, 1 x PATA, floppyBackplates: dual USB 2, FireWire. Cables: 6 x SATA data, 3 x Molex- to-dual SATA, ribbon PATA, ribbon floppy. SLI connector, Wi-Fi aerial, dual microphone, heatsink fan, InterVideo WinDVD suite
ECSATi Xpress 11001.261 PCI-E 16x, 1 PCI-E 1x, 2 PCI26-channel AC974 x USB 2, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet, parallel, serial, D-SUB output2 x USB 2, 2 x fan, TV-out, S/PDIF out4 x SATA, 1 x PATA, floppyCables: SATA data, Molex-to-SATA, ribbon parallel, 1 floppy
FOXCONNvidia Nforce 5901.282 PCI-E 16x, 1 PCI-E 1x, 1 PCI-E 4x, 2 PCI48-channel High Definition6 x USB 2, 2 x Gigabit Ethernet, digital S/PDIF, FireWire, FireWire 8002 x USB 2, FireWire, parallel, 1 x fan6 x SATA2, 2 x PATABackplates: parallel. Cables: 4 x USB 2, FireWire and mini-FireWire, 6 x SATA data, 3 x Molex-to-dual SATA power, 2 x rounded PATA, SLI connector
GIGABYTENvidia Nforce 5701.292 PCI-E 16x, 3 PCI-E 1x, 2 PCI48-channel High Definition4 x USB 2, FireWire, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet, parallel, serial, optical and digital S/PDIF3 x USB 2, 2 x FireWire, 2 x fan6 x SATA2, 1 x PATA, floppyCables: ribbon PATA, ribbon floppy, 6 x SATA data, SLI connector
MSINvidia Nforce 5701.282 PCI-E 16x, 2 PCI-E 1x, 3 PCI48-channel High Definition4 x USB 2, FireWire, 2 x Gigabit Ethernet, parallel, serial, optical and digital S/PDIF3 x USB 2, FireWire, infrared, 2 x fan6 x SATA2, 1 x PATA, floppyBackplates: dual USB 2 with POST diagnostic, FireWire and mini-FireWire. Cables: 4 x SATA data, 2 x Molex-to-SATA power, rounded PATA, rounded floppy, SLI connector, SLI connector clamp


MotherboardPriceSupplierOverall scoreAwards
ABIT$249Altech3 
ASUS$339Nintek6Recommended, A-List
ECS$120Protac4 
FOXCON$320Esys Integrated4 
GIGABYTE$240Gigabyte4 
MSI$257Mini Digital5Recommended
This article appeared in the August 2006 issue of PC Authority.