NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI: A Chipset For AM2 Enthusiasts And Other Users
ATI Announces SB600 Southbridge
NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI: A Chipset For AM2 Enthusiasts And Other Users
NVIDIA, like ATI with its SB600, decided to date the release of its new nForce 590 SLI core logic to the announcement of AM2. Though the new MCP can also be used in motherboards for AMD Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 X2 with the previous socket modification.
NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP traditionally pays a lot of attention to overclocking and gaming features:
- nTune BIOS adjustment
- NVIDIA FirstPacket traffic optimization
- NVIDIA LinkBoost that improves interaction with PCI Express for LinkBoost-enabled cards, e.g. NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
- EPP (Enhanced Performance Profiles) or "SLI-Ready Memory" like NVIDIA calls it
- NVIDIA DualNet: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet, TCP/IP packet and bandwidth management
- Up to 6 x SATA 3Gbps HDDs in various RAID configurations, including dual RAID 5 on a single controller
Obviously, NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP is designed for gaming enthusiasts unlike the aforementioned ATI SB600 positioned for a wider market segment. We suppose gamers will be offered nForce 590 SLI based motherboards bundled with, for example, Athlon FX-62 CPU that actually performs better with DDR2 memory.
Motherboards on nForce 590 SLI are expected from Abit, Aopen, Asrock, ASUSTeK, BFG, Biostar, DFI, ECS, eVGA, Foxconn, Gigabyte, Jetway, MSI, Shuttle and other vendors.
ATI Announces SB600 Southbridge
ATI has finally announced its SB600 Southbridge chip. It is the result of independence from ULi that initially provided ATI with such chips but was purchased by NVIDIA.
The SB600 works in cooperation with Northbridges, including Xpress 3200, 1600 and 1100. It supports 4 x Serial ATA/Serial ATA2 drives and RAID 0, 1, 10 as well as 2 x Ultra DMA 33/66/100/133 devices. Also supported are Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI).
The SB600 provides up to 10 x USB 2.0 ports and 6 x PCI slots (of which motherboard vendors usually provide only 3 and this number is going to reduce...) Other features include the Southbridge features a HDA codec and Gigabit LAN.
The company also re-announced the Xpress 3200 Northbridge that will also work in AM2 machines. ASUS, AsRock, ABIT, AOpen, DFI, ECS, Epox, Jetway, and MSI already declared support for ATI SB600.
Source: ATI, Reghardware
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