Foxconn and Gigabyte Tackle Socket AM2

Gaming Performance

We ran our standard battery of gaming benchmarks to assess performance, in single GPU as well as SLI mode. Benchmarks for single GPUs were conducted at 1280x1024/1280x960 without antialiasing or anisotropic filtering.













All three of the nForce 590 SLI motherboards perform similarly, with certain boards doing better in some games and falling slightly behind in others. NForce 570 SLI performance follows close behind, however, and given the much lower cost of such boards they are worth serious consideration. You can see that the new drivers and BIOS also caused some changes in the Foxconn results, but we would expect similar improvements/decreases on the other boards when running the same NVIDIA drivers.

Our general advice on both drivers and BIOS versions is to only upgrade if you have a specific issue that is fixed with the later version. We have also experienced BIOS flash failures using WinFlash with two different motherboards in the past couple of weeks, which makes features like Gigabyte's dual BIOS very useful. Unfortunately, neither of the failed motherboards had such a feature. At any rate, we would echo motherboard manufacturers' advice and urge caution with regards to BIOS updates. If you do need to flash the BIOS, you might also want to break out the old floppy drive and use a boot disk for maximum reliability.

SLI Performance

For dual GPU performance, we have increased the resolution to the 1600x1200, and we also ran with 4xAA and 8xAF enabled. We tested the single GPUs at these same settings for comparison. Even at the higher resolution with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, certain games are still at least partially CPU limited. Of course, other games like F.E.A.R. are almost entirely GPU limited at anything above 1024x768.











The nForce 590 SLI motherboards appear to have a slight performance advantage over their competition in the SLI market, but the results are still clustered together. If you plan on running a multi-GPU configuration, the more difficult question is going to be whether you want to run ATI cards or NVIDIA cards. If you want to run CrossFire on AM2 you'll have to wait for ATI based motherboards to begin shipping. We expect that to occur within the next month, and you will also be able to run CrossFire on Intel's 975X motherboards.