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Introduction

For the past year and a half, NVIDIA has enjoyed a very comfortable market share with their incredibly successful nForce 4 chipset. nForce 4 has become almost synonymous with AMD with regards to motherboards, which is due in large part to the fact that SLI will only officially work on a motherboard that features the proper nForce 4 chipset. Both VIA and SIS have released successful competing products, but NVIDIA's monopoly on SLI has kept all its competitors in the chipset market out of the very top end. The combination of nForce 4 and SLI have vaulted NVIDIA to a very desirable position in the market, with a very large chunk of the enthusiast segment.

Undoubtedly, NVIDIA did not want to let today's unveiling of AMD's Socket AM2 go by without something of their own to complement it. Thus, we get to introduce to you to their new top-to-bottom media and communications processor update, the nForce 500-series. While nForce 4 was released with SLI as its primary performance enhancing feature, NVIDIA do not have a single new technology on par with the performance gains that SLI brought with today's 500-series release. As a result, NVIDIA have put massive effort into increasing the number of useful features in the new series, and have focused on bringing ease of use and a large number of new options with regards to overclocking.

Another notable move on NVIDIA's part has been to create a standardized motherboard reference design for manufacturers to follow if they so choose. NVIDIA's primary goal in the creation of a reference design is to minimize hardware incompatibilities that may arise out of the designs that motherboard manufacturers have had to come up with for themselves in the past. Just as virtually no video card manufacturer designs their own PCB anymore but instead follow the reference designs of the chip maker, this move on NVIDIA's part makes a lot of sense. What this will lead to however (assuming that motherboard manufacturers take to using the reference design), is the differentiating of boards via bundle. Similarly to the occasionally outlandish bundles that are included with video cards now, motherboard manufacturers will be making all sorts of effort to differentiate their board package from the rest.

NVIDIA have provided us with a reference design board, manufactured by Foxconn, dubbed the C51XEM2AA. This motherboard uses the nForce 590 SLI MCP which is Crown Jewel of the 500-series. We will be going over the details of the 590 SLI and the C51XEM2AA over the next few following pages.

Read on to learn about the exciting new features that NVIDIA have incorporated into their 500-series chipset.