What do we get?

The board we tested today makes part of the Lanparty series. Designed to impress, and not only performance wise.

The board is quit colorfully. The dimm sockets, cpu bracket and extension slots are in a bright yellow and orange color, there are also yellow sata cables and rounded IDE and FDD cables provided in the box.


Click for larger picture

The usual equipment such as manual, driver CD end floppy, SLI Bridge. Last but not least we found a little piece of PCB with audio jacks on it. More about this later.

Board overview

General board remarks

This board supports every AM2 based cpu out there. AM2 is the successor of the very popular socket 939. Why has AMD chosen to change a socket? Mid 2006 AMD came with DDR2 memory support. Not only new boards were needed, but also a new series of processors. This is because AMD Athlon 64 CPUs have an integrated memory controller. The motherboard chipset has basically nothing to do anymore with the memory/cpu subsystem. To avoid that people would buy a DDR2 oriented processor but a DDR compatible board the new AM2 socket was brought to life.

AMD® Athlon 64 FX / Athlon 64 X2 / Athlon 64

Socket AM2

2000MT/s HyperTransport interface

This DFI board is using the fastest chipset based on the Nvidia Nforce 5 series: 590 SLI. This chipset exists out of two other chips:

NVIDIA nForce® 590 SLI MCP
- Northbridge: NVIDIA® C51XE
- Southbridge: NVIDIA® MCP55PXE

You can install up to 4 gigabyte of memory on this board, divided over four DDR2 DIMM sockets. Officially this board supports memory up to 800 Mhz and in 128 bit wide dual channel mode. Later on in his review we’ll take a look and see what we can squeeze out of this board using some high end DDR2 sticks.

As already mentioned this board supports SLI. This means that on this board you can install up to two NVIDIA video cards and pair them together. These can theoretically double the performance. Therefore there are 2 PCI Express slots available, both delivering the full 16x bandwidth at any time. An overview:

2 PCI Express x16 slots

1 PCI Express x1 slot

1 PCI Express x8 slot

3 PCI slots

There's more ->