nForce 590 SLI Roundup

Zitat

Roundups of motherboards on top chipsets rarely reveal explicit leaders and outsiders. But marketing specialists from each company still manage to single out their products. If we consider prices, the following models fight for the title of the most economic choice - ECS and Foxconn motherboards (the latter is a reference motherboard for nForce 590 SLI; you can come across the same motherboards from BFG, EVGA, and some other companies). The ECS model attracts users with its luxurious bundle and an additional IDE channel. Foxconn's bundle is not as good, but this motherboard supports FireWire 800 and digital output of multichannel audio to Dolby Digital.

Gigabyte's model is positioned higher. It's equipped with a passive chipset cooling system with heat pipes and an additional graphics port. ASUS and MSI compete in High-End class. Along with an offer to save on an external sound card (even some hard-driving users will be pleased with it), MSI highlights the elite nature of its product (the Diamond model comes with a "club card", which can be used to register on the official web site and get a special BIOS with extended overclocking options and enhanced performance). And ASUS offers three models for different target audiences. All the three come with passive cooling systems of different configurations. But they need practically no additional ventilation even in overclocked mode under load - that's what differs them from more compact designs from Gigabyte and MSI. The latter require at least indirect ventilation from a CPU fan even in the standard operating mode. Nevertheless, to get excellent overclocking results, you should get a CPU cooler, which can also blow at chipset heatsinks in all cases (fortunately, they are rather close to each other). M2N32-SLI Deluxe and M2N32 WS Professional are equipped with a 8-ch power converter for a processor. The idea of stable power supply is perfected in Crosshair (there are no capacitors at all). There are some interesting brand options - PCI-ports in the professional model, Wi-Fi adapter in the Deluxe model. And you should really see the Crosshair "in flesh", a brief description is useless.