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This board was pretty much built by nVidia, using its BIOS and design, but under the Foxconn name. It was used by nVidia at the launch to demonstrate the nForce 5 technology. It is an excellent example of a motherboard, that was initially shot down for being too expensive. Now, as the price has finally come down a bit, it's incredibly hard to actually find available to buy.

Naturally, being nVidia's show piece, it's based on the nForce 590 SLI chipset. The north bridge is passively cooled, while the south bridge has a small copper heatsink and fan. The fan looks like it wouldn't take long before it would start grinding to a halt.

The DIMM slots are down the right hand side of the motherboard, along with the 24-pin ATX connector and the single IDE connector. Directly underneath the IDE connector lies two SATA connectors. These are horizontal, while the other four connectors run vertically and sit towards the bottom of the motherboard.

There is a power and reset button soldered directly on to the motherboard. This is incredibly useful to me on my test bed, but will rarely get used inside a case. However, when you are fiddling around and diagnosing, being able to just press the power button is pretty handy and certainly a lot safer than running a screw driver across the pins.

On the back panel we have six USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire, PS/2 Ports and two Gigabit Ethernet. Audio is provided by the Realtek ALC882D chipset, and there are five analogue connections as well as optical S/PDIF output.

Should you need more connetivity, three brackets are included. One gives an extra four USB 2.0 ports, another gives a six pin and a four pin FireWire connector, and another gives a legacy Serial port.

There are only three fan headers, and one of these is used to power the chipset fan – a bit of a low turn out. On the plus side, the board supports the newer 8-pin EPS connector instead of the 4-pin 12V connector, although it will work with this too.

The two PCI Express graphics slots are well spaced and separated by an x1 and an x2 PCI Express slot. Finally, there are two PCI slots for adding any hardware that hasn't moved over to PCI Express yet, such as the X-Fi or Physics cards.

The BIOS inside this motherboard is pretty good, but then you'd expect that if nVidia hand crafted it to show off SLI. CPU voltage can be increased to 1.85V, DIMM voltage to 2.5V and several other key voltages that all come in handy when overclocking.

Obviously, this board supports all the SLI memory options, and takes full advantage of EPP. There is even an inbuilt memory tester so that you can make sure your memory is stable before risking a Windows boot, as unstable memory can cause hard drive corruption.

I managed to get around 310MHz out of this motherboard. That's OK, but in the grand scheme of things, I'm a little disappointed as most of the nForce 4 motherboards I've tested have been going to the 400MHz mark.

Verdict

This is without a doubt a good motherboard with many great features. However, it is hard to get hold of and still a little on the pricey side. This offers very little over the Abit, but I would certainly choose it over the Asus or Gigabyte.

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