NVIDIA nForce 500 Series of MCPs for Intel Processors.

Just two months ago NVIDIA released the nForce 500 Series mainboard chipset solution, the next generation product that took the best of NFORCE4, added a bucket load of new features, additional connectivity, threw in a handful of enthusiast tweaking gadgets and focus on raw gaming performance. Within that segment of mainboard chipsets we can find the nForce 590 SLI series of products. And that mid-range to high-end segment is really targeted at you guys, our readers - specifically people like gamers and the guys that build their own PCs and tweak the hell out of it. We call them the Enthusiast consumer.

That nForce 500 release coincided with AMD's release of Socket AM2 processors. What we already knew back then is that Intel was about to release their Core 2 Duo processors and had a feeling that these "Conroe" based processors would become rather popular.

Reason enough for NVIDIA to release the nForce 500 series for Intel's processors (Core 2 Duo as well). Today we'll be taking a brief look at the reference NVIDIA NFORCE 590 SLI mainboard. The tests were done with a reference board that is not 100% finished and unfortunately we did not receive a final product from a board partner like ASUS. Nonetheless even with this very beta reference mainboard I was shocked by the combination of Conroe and NFORCE 590 SLI for Intel, in very positive way I must add.

Now I already told you that nForce 500 is a nice improvement over the already wildly popular nForce 4 series. What makes this product series better then? Well a maximum performing chipset guaranteeing you the best tweaks, overclocks compared to the previous generation chipset, as well as a bucket load of cool features we have seen on the AMD version of this board like "SLI Memory" compatibility, "FirstPacket technology", TCP/IP acceleration and also the option for connecting 6 SATA drives in dual-RAID 5.

In this review we'll have a brief overview of that technology and obviously the cool new features as I just mentioned above. Also we'll have a look at some really cool new CAS 3 DDR2 memory from Corsair in combination with a rather inexpensive yet really impressive Conroe E6600 processor running at default on a 1066 MHz front side bus.

As always we'll do something special though and that special factor is that we'll passively water-cool this processor mounted into this NFORCE 590 SLI mainboard to see if we can still overclock it. And all that during a heat wave here in Europe. The direct competitor for this setup obviously is the AMD version of the NFORCE 590 SLI mainboard armed with an AMD FX-62 processor, will this system be able to beat that twice as expensive solution performance wise?

Interesting? You betcha! Next page please...