MaximumPC 2006 09

reviewsTESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED

74 MA XIMUMPC SEPTEMBER 2006

9

ou’ve lived for months through slow

frame rates, weekend-long video

encodes, and single-core slowdowns

while you patiently waited for AMD’s AM2

platform. Fortunately, your long wait wasn’t

in vain. AMD has finally pulled the wraps off

the socket that will take its procs beyond the

GHz mark, and your patience puts you in

the prime upgrade position. All you need to

know is which motherboard to buy. We look

at two of the hottest contenders to carry you

to the AM2 promised land.

—GORDON MAH UNG

FOXCONN C51XEM2AA

If you want to judge n6idia’s vision for the

new AM2 nForce 50 SLI chipset, look no

further than Foxconn’s C518EM2AA. This

motherboard is the closest you’ll get to

n6idia’s concept design. In fact, n6idia even

wrote the BIOS for this board.

Given this cozy relationship, it’s no sur-

prise that the C518EM2AA supports every

new feature of the nForce 50 SLI chipset,

including nTune 5, which lets you tweak the

system from the OS.

The board’s overall layout is accom-

modating except for three gaffes. One

mistake is admittedly minor: The LED for

POST codes is partially obscured if you

run SLI. Far more annoying is the fact that

Foxconn placed key components too close

together. The 2AM slots are so near to the

CP5 that the heat spreaders on Corsair’s

SLI-2eady 2AM almost touch a standard

A6C heatsink. Not good. Also, the green

south-bridge fan is dangerously close to the

PCI-E retention clip—unless you have carni-

val-freakshow fingers, you won’t be able to

remove the graphics card without pulling the

whole board out of your PC. Or you can just

break off the retention clip completely.

There’s plenty of hardware goodness to

make up for bloopers, however. We like the

four additional LEDs, which indicate which

of the PS5’s power rails are hot. Inclusion of

FireWire B is also a nice touch. Furthermore,

Foxconn includes an onboard speaker as

well as onboard power-on and reset but-

tons—all desirable features. And we like that

the C518EM2AA SATA ports are intelligently

laid out so you can use all of them easily.

The most exciting aspect of the

C518EM2AA is the highly tweakable BIOS,

which is sure to have people scouring the

Internet trying to figure out what all the fea-

tures do. Even if you’re not into manually

adjusting every option for your overclock, the

C518EM2AA supports Corsair’s SLI-2eady

2AM, which is intended to provide automatic

overclocking of the CP5 and 2AM. We had

so-so luck with the automatic-overclocking

feature, though. With a pair of extremely low-

latency DIMMs from Corsair, the board was a

touch unstable, so we swapped out the mod-

ules for a pair of less aggressive modules and

experienced no hiccups.

Sporting the same hardware and identi-

cally configured BIOSes, the C518EM2AA

and the Asus M2N2-SLI Deluxe Wireless

(reviewed below), were virtually neck-and-

neck in performance. So read on to see

where the differences do lie.

ASUS M2N32-SLI DELUXE

WIRELESS EDITION

Asus’ modus operandi of late has been to

rush out new board designs so far ahead of

its competitors that the other guys just seem

to give up. Witness the company’s A8N2-

SLI Deluxe board. In the dual-x16 nForce

category, it was the only game in town for

months on end.

This time around, Asus enjoys no early

lead but the company still manages to

add in some nice extras. The AM2-based

M2N2-SLI Deluxe Wireless Edition ships

with an 802.11b/g Wi-Fi card that supports

AM2 Arrives!

Two motherboards vie to be the home of

your new Athlon 64 CPU

nVidia worked closely with Foxconn on its nForce 590 board, even writing the

board’s BIOS.

$250, http://www.foxconnchannel.com

FOXCO.. C5XE-2!!

THE FORCE

Well-placed SATA ports and

PCI-E slots; full support of

all nForce5 features.

MITACLORIANS^9

Poorly designed graphics-card

retention clip.

BE.C(MARKS

(^) FOXCONN ASUS
SISOFT SANDRA COMPOSITE 7,285 7,256
3DMARK 2001 SE 35,722 35,163
3DMARK 2005 11,118 11,030
3DMARK 2006 5,995 6,113
QUAKE III (FPS) 571 570
QUAKE 4 (FPS) 160 155
PREMIERE PRO HDV (SEC) 2675 2693
PHOTOSHOP CS2 (SEC) 279 282
3DDB (MB/S) 1,360 1,313
FEAR (FPS) 200 205
We used an Athlon 64 FX-62, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800, a Western Digital 4000KD SATA hard drive and GeForce 7900 GTX to test the motherboard
performance.