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AMD Socket AM2 Motherboard Group Test

Author	Andrew 'Spode' Miller
Published	15th Sep 2006
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Despite my recent Core 2 Duo piece, which proved Intel's latest processor to be considerably better than the AMD equivalent, many people will still be going down the AMD route. With AMD's competitive price cuts and the fact that most games are not limited by the processor you choose, but rather the graphics card, this isn't an insane choice - but probably not the smartest either.

However, if you want to run SLI, AM2 is the best route, as the only SLI Intel boards available are nForce 4 based and also incredibly hard to find.

Whatever your reasons are (some of them will of course just be down to gut feeling and/or fanboyism), we've decided to take a look at five boards on the market, based on the nForce 570 SLI, nForce 590 SLI and ATI CrossFire Express 3200 chipsets for AMD socket AM2.

The motherboard is the backbone of your system. Everything else plugs directly in to it, so making a bad choice can affect your whole system's performance and reliability. Pre-Athlon 64, performance would vary greatly from chipset to chipset, mainly because of the different memory controllers. However, after the launch of the Athlon 64, the memory controller was moved from the chipset to the chip itself. Aside from superb memory performance, a key upshot of this is that performance across all chipsets is now almost identical.

Raw performance can be slightly different from board to board, usually depending on how the manufacturer decides to set up the motherboard. Unless you are the kind of guy that likes to leave the BIOS well alone, you can get similar performance increases by just tweaking a little yourself.

Generally though, a motherboard comes down to price, features, layout, overclocking and the BIOS.

Although we have done performance testing, this really only acts as a gauge of stability and to check for anything unusual. Similarly, even if you aren't going to overclock, it is worth remembering that a machine capable of overclocking is likely to be more stable at stock speeds. Think of it as over specifying.

I tested all five motherboards using an AMD Athlon FX62. I used 2GB of Corsair 800MHz DDR2 memory, rated at 4-4-4-12. The hard drive used was a Seagate Barracuda ST3400832AS and the power supply was a Tagan TurboJet 900W