A short while ago, NVIDIA demonstrated their latest to several members of the press. While there were some leaks prior to the embargo date today, we here at Viper Lair are ready to share with you what we've known about for weeks. The gloves are off and NVIDIA will be announcing a whole family of nForce products covering a number of SKUs. Our focus will be on the nForce 590 SLI, their no excuses chipset for the enthusiast.

As most of you can already figure out, the nForce 500 series is the fifth generation of their chipsets. The nForce 500 series does have a lot in common with the nForce 4, but NVIDIA didn't just grab an existing design, change the socket and stamp a new model number to support new CPUs from AMD (immediate) and Intel (forthcoming). They have added a fair number of new features and some architectural changes that should bode well for the intended market. What does the future hold? Read on to find out.

Which Board is for You?

All the press you'll be reading today will be focusing on their premium nForce 590 SLI product. However, there will be several products from the nForce 500 series making an appearance now and in the near future.

Product Line	CPU	Target Market
nForce 590 SLI	Athlon FX, X2, 64	Enthusiast
nForce 570 SLI	Athlon FX, X2, 64	Performance Gamers
nForce 570 Ultra	Athlon FX, X2, 64	Performance Users
nForce 550	Athlon 64, Sempron	Mainstream

The nForce 590 SLI is NVIDIA's no excuses enthusiast product. All the key features we'll discuss throughout this article, such as LinkBoost, FirstPacket and DualNet to name a few will be present in the 590 SLI. The 570 SLI will also be feature-rich, but will not include their LinkBoost technology, and SLI support will be restricted to x8. The obvious missing feature from the 570 Ultra is SLI, but the board will still be an attractive option (that will also be cheaper than the SLI versions) for users who require some of the new technology but are not concerned about SLI gaming.

While the 590 and 570 based products support the Athlon FX, as well as the Athlon X2 and Athlon 64, the nForce 550 is limited to the Athlon 64 and AMD Sempron. This board is aimed at the cost conscious crowd, and in order to meet that price point, some of the more advanced features mentioned earlier will not be included here.

Product Line	Release Date	Price
nForce 590 SLI	Now to June	$150++
nForce 570 SLI	Now to June	$130++
nForce 570 Ultra	June	$110+
nForce 550	Now to June	$70+

The chart above is the expected launch dates and pricing of the products. You can expect the usual board partners such as MSI, ASUS, Foxconn and others to release their products in the different markets in the next several weeks.

The board pictured above is a Foxconn C51XEM2AA motherboard, powered by NVIDIA's nForce 590 SLI. The sample we received should be the finished retail product, so expect the benchmarks you'll see today be representative of the final product. While we cannot comment about other manufacturers at this time, we can tell you that Foxconn's nForce 590 SLI will fully support every feature of the chipset and follows NVIDIA's reference design to a T. The C51XEM2AA also features a 6-layer design that allows for better power delivery and stability. This design is especially important if you max out the ram allocation, and moreso if you're using 1066MHz memory.

A lot of work has been put into the placement of motherboard components in order to make upgrades and general motherboard user maintenance much easier. For example, if you're using a double-wide video card, you will still have access to one x1 PCI Express slot and in SLI mode, one x1 PCI Express and one PCI. There are also reset and power buttons built into the board that will make troubleshooting much easier for end users. Other features are dual LAN and HD audio. We'll be looking at the Foxconn C51XEM2AA exclusively in the near future, so stay tuned.

New CPU Support

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past several months, or simply don't care about the state of enthusiast technology, you're probably well aware of AMD's newest CPU design dubbed the AM2 released today. While there aren't really a whole lot of major changes, there are some refinements to the fab process and of course, DDR2 support. Like before, this is still being handled with AM2's own memory controller built into the CPU.

That said, Socket 939/754 won't be gone right away, but don't expect to see much press on the older technology in the future. Furthermore, there is currently no nForce 500 series options for these socket designs. On a side note, NVIDIA do have plans to introduce nForce 4 boards for AM2, complete with DDR2 support. We don't have much detail regarding this at the moment, but we'll share what we'll learn as it comes in.

We did not get much info for Intel, but what we can tell you is that Conroe, Intel's next-gen chip, will be supported by the Intel Edition of the nForce 500 series as well as all of Intel's current LGA775 CPUs. The features will be identical with the exception that NVIDIA will have much more flexibility in board design given that they will be responsible for the memory controller.

Enhanced Performance Profiles

Last week NVIDIA and Corsair announced that they have collaborated on a new open standard memory specification called Enhanced Performance Profiles (EPP). As some of you may know, AMD has pretty much taken care of the memory controller since the introduction of the Athlon 64 family, and that will not be changing for the AM2.

The purpose of EPP is to make tweaking easier for, erm, tweakers. Provided you have a nForce 590 or 570 SLI based motherboard, the BIOS will detect the memory and prompt the user to enable the built-in optimizations. If you're guessing that this sounds like detecting Serial Presence Detect (SPD) settings, you would be partially correct as EPP is an extension to SPD. As NVIDIA explained to us, Corsair uses the extra space in the SPD region of memory to hold the extra EPP settings and the NVIDIA BIOS contains code to read that information.

We received two kits with our review package that feature EPP. The Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4 is an 800MHz kit that features low latencies. From what we were told by NVIDIA, low latency memory runs faster with AMD processors because of the integrated memory controller. The other kit pictured above is the Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5, which has higher latencies but is clocked much more aggressively at 1066MHz. Both of these kits are supported by all nForce 590/570 SLI based boards.

By default, SLI-Ready Memory is disabled. While NVIDIA and Corsair have done extensive testing, overclocking is always a case of your mileage may vary. Provided your memory is indeed SLI-Ready certified, you'll have a number of options once enabled. Disabled, any memory clocked at 800MHz and up will run at 800MHz. CPUOC0% runs the memory at 936MHz. Note that at this speed, as the setting implies, there is no CPU overclocking. Each increment thereafter will increase the CPU overclocking by the specified amount.

NVIDIA's tests have shown about 15% improvement in SiSoft Sandra and 4% in games such as Doom 3 using CPUOC0%. While overclocking memory isn't new, EPP makes it much simpler and less tedious than it has been in the past. Still, nothing has been removed though and enthusiasts wishing to do things the old way can still do so.

While this is a joint development between NVIDIA and Corsair, the EPP specifications are open standard as mentioned earlier, and expect to see other memory manufacturers to release products with EPP support, such as Kingston and OCZ.

In order to aid the end user, NVIDIA will have a SLI certification specification and any memory modules designed to be SLI memory will have a NVIDIA SLI-Ready stamp on it. As a side note, this certification process covers over 250 products currently, and is not limited strictly to memory.

LinkBoost

Provided you opt for a 590 SLI motherboard, you will be able to use NVIDIA's LinkBoost technology.

No LinkBoost

PCs generally have to follow a set of specifications when it comes to communication between peripherals and bus speeds. As you can see in the above picture, a typical video card will communicate with the SPP at 8GB/sec.

LinkBoost

When you plug in a LinkBoost supporting video card, the technology can boost the MCP and PCI Express HyperTransport speeds by up to 25%. At this time, only the 7900GTX supports LinkBoost, though you do not require SLI for the technology to work.

NEXT