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Since today's article is following a rare structure -- chipset launches only happen so often -- you will not see a full slew of standard motherboard benchmarks comparing our nForce 590 reference system to other motherboards. The first and foremost reason for this, of course, is that the nForce 500-series is the only chipset out there currently being launched along with Socket AM2. Since Socket AM2 is a different platform, we felt it would be better to build up a repertoire of results comparing a number of different Socket AM2 boards before we go back to our routine motherboard benchmark runs.

Instead, we're making things a bit more interesting, and will be testing a few of the major advertised features of the nForce 590 using a select few benchmarks in order to illustrate the real-world effects. Our platform consists of the following:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (Socket AM2, dual-core, 512 KB L2 per cache)
• Foxconn C51XEM2AA motherboard (nForce 590 SLI)
• BFG GeForce 7900 GTX OC (non-SLI + SLI)
• 2x 1024 MB Corsair PC2-6400 memory @ 4-4-4-12/1T

Driver versions used were NVIDIA ForceWare 91.27 and NVIDIA nForce 9.34. All testing was done on a fully-patched Windows XP Service Pack 2 installation with DEP disabled.

Alright, let's take a look at the first of the major features -- LinkBoost!