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The Foxconn C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H

Now that we've handled the bigger part of the chipset and the new features, let's talk about the FoxConn C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H a little. As you understand by now, this is the enthusiast nForce 590 SLi mainboard from FoxConn. Lot's of manufacturers will produce these 590 boards, NVIDIA selected FoxConn to sample to the press.

So we are enthusiast guru's .. we demand features then right ? Get this: with this mainboard you'll receive dual x16 PCIe connectors along with a x4 PCIe and a x1 PCIe connector and two legacy PCI connectors. HD wise you can hook up 2 PATA (IDE) drives and six Serial ATA II devices. The Serial ATA II controller is RAID compatible 0,1,5 & 0+1 and also quite cool .. is hot swappable so that you can plug in/out a HD with your system powered on.

Also, and we already told you Dual Gigabit Ethernet LAN/WAN connectors can be found at this mainboard. So external connectivity is big these days .. so you get 10 USB 2.0 ports, two 1394b FireWire ports and a 1394a FireWire port are present for portable devices.

Oh dude .. I'm not even finished.

Obviously all AMD socket AM2 processors are supported. We'll find 4 DIMM DDR2 slots that can carry 256Mb,512Mb and 1 Gb DDR2 533/677/800 and overclocked obviously even faster.

Onboard audio is pretty good actually. Is however is based on Azalia and obviously offers 7.1 HD audio (Realtek ALC883-codec). For this matter Nvidia won't offer anything better than Intel, ATI and ULI (some of the Azalia supporters). Azalia is good but it's still not enough to cope with what everybody loved so much with NFORCE 2, Sound Storm. Anyway, you'll get a pretty decent 7.1 surround listening experience.

Last little fact, NVIDIA and Foxconn opted to go for a 6-layer board design relatively to the standard 4-layer design. Six-layer designs offer better power and ground planes but also are superior from an electrical perspective, NVIDIA and Foxconn primarily used a 6-layer design to support the 4-channel memory interface and to support the higher signaling speeds of 1066MHz DDR2 memory.

We'll discuss the mainboard's features and connectivity with the help of a photoshoot after which we'll show you a nice selection of BIOS features.

Engage ensign ...

There she is .. the FoxConn, C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H, quite an impressive backplane folks ! Let us sift through the photo's now.

Nice black PCB, good layout. Enthusiast mainboards require enthusiast solutions and stuff we like to see. Simple things are addressed, for example the ATX power header in the corner to reduce obstruction to other connectors.