Product Listing

Foxconn C51XEM2AA (nForce 590 SLI)

By Zachary Chan - 25 May 2006

Conclusion

Conclusion

The Foxconn C51XEM2AA is a simple motherboard, if anyone can ever call an nForce 590 SLI motherboard simple. The features of the board, while daunting at the moment, will be a common sight once more manufacturers push out their nForce 500 series line-up. However, we do like how Foxconn has included a FireWire-800 capable controller to complete the board's feature list. Design-wise, the base motherboard follows NVIDIA's design to a tee, so while the layout is functional, it isn't totally ideal.

The performance benefits of Socket AM2 processors were evident during our benchmarking as DDR2-800 memory was able to deliver enough bandwidth to overcome its increased latency. Even our highly tweaked DDR-400 modules running at 5-2-2-2 CMD 1T on the nForce4 SLI X16 reference board was trailing behind an average of 5-8% in memory intensive benchmarks. Otherwise, a similarly clocked Socket 939 processor on the nForce4 chipset seemed to still be able to hold its own with an AM2 processor - MHz to MHz.

From our testing experience with the Socket AM2 processors, nForce 590 SLI in general and the C51XEM2AA, Foxconn has a very stable motherboard on their hands and as far as tweaking goes, the nForce 590 SLI just opens up a whole new can of worms. The C51XEM2AA allows the user access to ultra detailed options for tweaking memory, frequencies and voltages and stays true to NVIDIA's promise of increased granularity for performance enhancement. Control freaks would have loved the independently clocked buses as well. However, with more control at the users hands, one will have to be cautious as some options could damage hardware. Because of this, overclocking with the C51XEM2AA is a slightly trickier affair, though our board did come through on the hype of greater overclocking with the nForce 590 SLI chipset. 314MHz HT bus on a 5x multiplier isn't a number to be trifled with.

The Foxconn C51XEM2AA is the standard reference NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI board, complete with all the chipset's bells and whistles.

However, Foxconn's BIOS still needs time to mature in order to draw out the full performance of the nForce 590 SLI chipset, that we have no doubt about. Results from using the much touted LinkBoost and GPU Ex features (as mentioned in our nForce 500 chipset article here ) didn't yield much noticeable performance gains and the HyperTransport multiplier didn't have an effect on further overclocking, but if you need the cutting edge right now with the best performing AMD platform chipset at the moment, the C51XEM2AA will do you just fine as it is.

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