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This is actually the motherboard that AMD sent to us when it first launched the AM2 platform – that's a pretty heavy endorsement from AMD and almost enough to assume it's a great board. After all, if you were launching a new platform, you'd want to show it in its best possible light.

This are actually two editions of this motherboard out – this board and the wireless edition. The wireless edition obviously has onboard wireless, but also has a number of other changes – namely some expansion slot movement. So be aware that if you want the wireless board, it will be slightly different, but the underlying technology is the same.

This particular board is based on the nForce 590 SLI chipset, which is nVidia's flagship chipset. This uses two separate chips as part of the chipset, in order to give each PCI Express graphics slot a full 16 lanes. As the 590 SLI also supports LinkBoost, we actually have an equivalent bandwidth of 20 lanes per card - quite an increase over the eight lanes per slot of the 570 SLI. It's just unfortunate that it makes no real difference to performance.

The layout of this board is pretty good. Unlike most of the boards, the DIMM slots are at the very top of the board, parallel to the edge. As most cases have a case fan just above the IO panel, this means that air flow will be running directly over the memory. Although DDR2 is cooler than DDR, when you are putting extra voltage through it, it can be rather warm.

The board itself is quite heavily cooled, albeit passively. There is a heatsink on both sets of voltage regulators and one on the north and south bridge. A heatpipe connects the north and south bridge, while two longer heatpipes connect the north bridge to both the VRM heatsinks. The chipset heatsinks are solid and require no airflow, while the VRM heatsinks are finned and get their air from the CPU cooler. Although the metal looks like copper, it's actually anodised aluminium.

If you are running a passive cooler, or water cooler, then naturally there is no air left to flow on to the VRM heatsinks. Because of this, Asus has included a clip-on YS Tech blower than will cool them.

Along the right hand edge lies the floppy and IDE connector, as well as the 24-pin ATX connector. The 4-pin 12V connector is located just next to the primary PCI Express slot, which may cause some issues if your graphics card has a bulky behind.

There are six SATA connectors, but if you have a graphics card in the secondary PCI Express graphics slot, it may obstruct a couple of these. However, the chances of you having six devices to plug in is pretty slim, so you can use the top slots instead. There is also a seventh SATA connection towards the top left of the board running off a Silicon Image chip. This chip is mainly there to power the eSATA connection on the IO Panel.

There are seven fan headers, which is a healthy number and they are well positioned.

Asus was actually the first company to introduce an SLI board with extra space inbetween the slots, and I've not seen one that hasn't been in this style yet. Inbetween the two PCI Express graphics slots lies a PCI slot as well as an x2 PCI Express slot. This middle slot could plausably be used for an X-Fi or Physics card, where cooling isn't as much of an issue. Where as most people will place x1 PCI Express slots here, there is very little use for them currently.

Below the second PCI Express slot are another two PCI slots. If you're not using dual slot graphics cards, that's plenty of expansion possibility.

There are two USB headers and a single FireWire header. These will often go unused, but Asus has included two brackets, one with two USB 2.0 ports on and one with a single FireWire port. Audio is provided by the Analogue Devices AD1988B chip, which is a highly capable eight channel HD chipset. On the I/O panel there is both optical and coaxial S/PDIF output, as well as all six analogue connections. We also have four USB 2.0 ports, a serial port, PS/2 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet connections, a single FireWire and an eSATA connection.

The BIOS was good to use, as I've come to expect from Asus. Base frequency was adjustable from 200 to 425MHz, with full memory adjustment and HT multipliers. Pretty much everything you'll need is in there. DDR2 voltage can be increased to 2.5V and the CPU can be pushed up to 1.565v, with an extra 200mv if needed.

Just like the Foxconn board, it supports EPP/SLI Memory so detected the correct frequencies for our Corsair memory. There are options for Optimal, Maximum Performance and Maximum Frequnecy. Optimal and Maximum Frequency had the same effect, increasing the memory to 928MHz. This will offer a bigger increase than memory timings alone.

Overclocking was simple and it was stable to around the 333MHz mark. I must admit, I was expecting a lot more – especially as the Abit was managing 300MHz. Still, this isn't bad.

However, a couple of my performance results were a little on the fast side, so I went back to re-test. Upon doing so, I ran in to a whole host of stability issues that I couldn't pin point down to anything in particular. As I didn't have any issues the first time around, I'm not sure I'd want to condemn the board for this, but it certainly concerns me.

Verdict

This is a well laid out board, and overclocks the best out of the selection. However, the stability issue had me concerned, and there is no real 3D performance benefit over the nForce 570 SLI Chipset Abit board. However, Asus has obviously tweaked the BIOS somewhat as it was consistently faster by a few seconds.

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