|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
BIOSTAR TForce 590 SLI Motherboard Review :: Biostar TForce 590 SLI Features
The TForce 590 SLI board is based upon NVIDIA's nForce 590 SLI Northbridge. This chipset supports all current AMD Socket 940 AM2 CPUs on the market including the FX-62, the 5000+, the 4800+ and the various other AM2 CPUs on the market. One thing to note is that the new FX-70 series CPUs require an nForce 680a motherboard from ASUS, and can't be used with this motherboard.  CPU Socket  DIMM Sockets AMD introduced DDR2 memory support with the launch of the AM2 platform. The TForce 590 SLI fully supports DDR2 400/533/667 and 800MHz memory. Note that today all chipsets on both the Intel and AMD platforms support DDR2 memory except for the odd Socket 939 motherboards still on the market. Moving forward it is likely we'll see DDR3 introduced to motherboard chipsets sometime in 2008.  PCI Express x16 slots SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface. It was introduced by NVIDIA in late 2004 along with the nForce4 SLI chipset. The idea is to combine two video cards on the same motherboard to offer increased performance and image quality over a single card. The Biostar TForce 590 SLI comes with two PCI Express x16 slots to allow SLI with x16 lanes to each card. Also present on the board is a PCI Express x1 slot, a PCI Express x4 slot, and two regular PCI slots. If two-slot video cards are used like an 8800GTX the PCI Express x1 slot and the first PCI slot are covered.  Southbridge  5 SATA ports  IDE+Floppy NVIDIA's MCP (Media Communications Processor) 55 is the Southbridge for this motherboard. This chip supports up to six SATA ports natively. Five are present on the TForce 590 SLI board, with the sixth port on the back panel IO for external SATA (eSATA). The MCP55 supports RAID 0 (Stripping), 1 (Mirroring), and 10 (Mirroring and Stripping) and RAID 5 mode. NVIDIA has an application their drivers called MediaShield that controls their RAID array in Windows.  CD In  Sound Effect  Mixer  Audio I/O  Microphone  3D Audio demo Onboard sound is provided by the Realtek ALC882 CODEC found on many motherboards in the market today. The onboard sound is adequate for most users, with those wanting better sound able to purchase a Creative Labs X-Fi or other sound product to upgrade the sound on the system. I prefer to use ADI over Realtek but that's a personal preference of mine. The ALC882 supports High Definition Audio with the ability to do multiple simultaneous audio streams, 7.1 surround sound and Dolby Digital Audio.  Rear IO  eSATA The Rear Input/Output back panel has the necessary connections for the PC on the board. PS/2 Keyboards and Mice are still around but have increasingly been replaced by Wireless Mice and Keyboards, so both connectors are present on the IO. The aforementioned eSATA port is on the IO allowing you to connect external SATA devices. Four USB 2.0 ports are present, allowing you to attach USB keyboards and mice. Two RJ-45 jacks are present controlled by two Marvell PHY chips. Contents:Discuss This Article
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
