[H]ard|OCP ASUS M2N32-SLI Premium nForce 590 based motherboard
The M2N32-SLI Premium is the newest member of ASUS’ AMD AM2 processor line, with support for all current AMD AM2 style processors. ASUS chose to design the board using the NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP chipset, which supports Athlon64 socket AM2 type processors, DDR2 style DRAM modules operating in Dual Channel mode at speeds up to 800MHz, and dual NVIDIA PCI Express x16 video cards operating at full x16 SLI mode. The board itself is a feature complete solution, requiring only an Athlon64 socket AM2 type CPU, DDR2 memory, drives, and a PSU for a fully working system. ASUS integrated the following components in to the M2N32-SLI Premium’s design: 1 IDE ATA-100 port and 6 SATA II ports (RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 capable) on the NVIDIA controller; 1 SATA II port and 1 e-SATA port (RAID 0 and 1 capable) on the Silicon Image controller; 8 USB 2.0 capable ports (4 in rear panel, and 2 onboard headers supporting 2 ports each); 2 IEEE 1394 capable ports (1 in rear panel, and 1 onboard header support 1 port); 2 NVIDIA GigE Ethernet ports in rear panel; ADI 8-channel audio codec featuring S/PDIF optical and RCA component output ports; and COM and PS/2 port support in the rear panel.
The M2N32-SLI Premium is also a “Vista Edition” motherboard with some Vista-only features we will cover below. While we have been using Vista in some of our testing, we have yet to find the driver sets needed for testing to be up to par, so we are still using XP as our base for testing. We find it hard to penalize the motherboard for problems that are inherent in the driver and software sets...
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