Product Listing

Preview - Gigabyte's AM2 Boards (NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI & 570 SLI)

By Vijay Anand - 3 May 2006

The Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 (nForce 570 SLI)

The Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 (nForce 570 SLI)

One rung below the almighty nForce 590 SLI chipset is the nForce 570 SLI single-chip solution. The key difference? The nForce 570 SLI features dual PCIe x8 lanes SLI setup instead of two PCIe x16 lanes SLI setup, which is more than sufficient for mainstream usage. The GA-M57SLI-S4 (not the finalized model name), is one such board that is based on the nForce 570 SLI as featured below:-

Gigabyte's nForce 570 SLI motherboard looks rather straightforward unlike the nForce 590 model seen earlier that was screaming for attention. Its expansion slots are well positioned and has the following configuration:- two PCI slots, two PCIe x16 slots (x8 electrical configuration each) and three PCIe x1 slots.

The board has plenty of 'breathing' room around the socket area and the power regulation components.

Further down, components seem to be a little tightly positioned. Also, the board seems to be missing a floppy drive connector that we saw here on the upper class model…

… And we found it on the rear side corner of the board. Not ideal at all in our opinion.

Most of the headers are neatly aligned on the left side of the board, but if all of them were going to be used, it's going to get claustrophobic there. Towards where the expansion slots are located, you'll find that that the board has a T.I. three-port FireWire-400 chip.

Just like the MSI board we previewed, this Gigabyte board uses a large flat heatsink to keep the chipset's heat output in check whilst not obstructing any potential long expansion cards. Six SATA 3.0Gpbs ports are native to the chipset and you'll find them all bordering the chipset.

The BIOS chip is sandwiched between the graphics card slots, but unfortunately this model may not feature Dual BIOS technology.

Finally, the board's rear I/O is as shown here with everything that one can expect from a modern upper mid-class motherboard. The board's audio capabilities are also managed by the Realtek ALC-883 HD audio CODEC just like its bigger brother.

Well, that wraps up our grand tour of Gigabyte's two upcoming Socket AM2 motherboards targeted at the upper-midrange and pure enthusiasts. They are certainly interesting boards to look forward to and while we would very much like to bring you some performance figures, NDA constraints have held us back from doing so at the moment (, which we always religiously adhere to maintain everyone's best interests). The launch date is less than a month away, so stay tuned as we bring you the full scoop shortly.

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