AM2 Motherboard Reviews

Well, we're finally starting to see some AM2 motherboards hitting the review stands, so here's a few to get you going.

Anandtech does two at once with a Foxconn C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H and Gigabyte's GA-M59SLI-S5:

The Gigabyte board seems to have a better overall design and layout, and the completely silent cooling solution is definitely nice. Extreme overclockers will probably want to add active cooling to the chipset heatsink(s) anyway, but depending on your choice of case it may be unnecessary. Overclocking on the prerelease Gigabyte board also seems a bit spotty, but we expect that to improve with the retail shipments. The Gigabyte wins out in the feature department when it comes to SATA ports and the expansion slots. The third X16 PCI-E slot certainly isn't required right now, but if you believe in "future proofing" your computer it could prove useful in another year or so. All you need now is actual retail availability of the Gigabyte board.

[H]ard|OCP also takes on Foxconn's nForce 590 SLI (I can't bear to type that model name out again):

Going into this review, I wasn’t expecting much. I’ve heard of Foxconn for years, but not in association with the enthusiast marketplace. Boy was I wrong. The board was a breeze to get put together and working. Its performance is nothing short of amazing across the board, and it even had a bit of overclocking headroom. I’ve seen a lot of new product lines come across my desk, but this one is one of the few that was virtually seamless from the start.

Lastly, PC Stats gives Asus M2N32-SLI some review action:

At low speeds the Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard was quite easy to overclock, it didn't show any signs of instability until 235 MHz was reached. At that speed, the voltage to the nVidia C51XE chipset had to be increased to 1.3V. Continuing to push the motherboard higher, the Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe easily passed the 250 MHz barrier - a good sign considering it's the first revision. Early revisions of chipsets tend not to overclock that well, it's nice to see this is not the case here with the nVidia nForce 590 SLI.