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BFG Tech 590 SLI Motherboard Review

BFGRAN590S… or Something

February 26, 2007

By Josh Walrath

The Board

            NVIDIA worked extensively with Foxconn to design a board that would expose every feature and every bit of functionality on the nForce 590 SLI chipset.  They started off with a four phase power supply to the CPU.  This keeps ripple effects to a minimum, and also keeps the power circuitry cooler because of the shared load.  It would have been nice to have some kind of heatsinks on the VRMs, but apparently the temps they reach are well within specs.  They also enabled the use of an E-ATX power supply, with the alternate 8 pin 12v CPU plug.  The board will still work with just the 4 pin ATX plug, but it is not recommended when running in SLI.  This is typically not a problem as most modern high end and midrange power supplies also have the 8 pin E-ATX plug.  To further enhance power delivery, at the bottom of the board is a 4 pin molex plug, also suggested when using SLI.  Power is definitely well distributed around the board.

BFG protects the board rather nicely, and underneath it is a thick pink pad to keep it from being jarred while shipped.

            The board can handle up to 8 GB of PC-6400 DDR-2 memory.  These support EPP (Enhanced Performance Profiles) enabled DIMMS, so they are optimized for performance right out of the gate.  EPP features more detailed timing information than the standard EPROM.  This means that EPP has more timing values for non-standard clockspeeds (such as speeds above DDR-2 800).  The board only features one IDE connection, so those with 2 or more DVD Readers or Writers may want to consider getting SATA versions or using PATA to SATA converters.  Personally I am not a huge fan of IDE, especially with two devices on one cable.  I have found with CD or DVD copying far more writing problems when both drives share the same IDE cable.  The board still features a single floppy connection, which is handy for flashing the BIOS of the board as well as loading RAID drivers in Windows XP/64.

            The ATX backplate features six USB 2.0 ports, the 7.1 sound riser, the PS2 ports, as well as the single 1394B connection.  A total of 10 USB ports are supported by this board, as well as two more 1394A ports (all provided by the bundled cables).

            Two Gigabit Ethernet ports are built onto the board, and they support the DualNet feature of the 590 SLI chipset.  DualNet basically takes the two ports and makes it look like one 2 Gigabit Ethernet port.  For applications which require that kind of bandwidth (think file server on a Gig-E network servicing many different computers) it is a handy feature.  The Gig-E ports also support TCP-IP offload/acceleration and FirstPacket technology.

The board is busy and jam packed with stuff.  Cooling is not exceptional, but it certainly is adequate.

            The board utilizes the Realtek HD Audio codec.  It does feature Dolby Digital encoding (enabled in the latest drivers from Realtek).  Otherwise it is an un-exciting choice.  Overall sound quality is about average, and the Realtek codecs have issues in playing back EAX 1.0 and 2.0 content correctly.  The two PCI slots do enable the user to add in their own sound card, which is what I would recommend with this particular product.  Even with two dual slot graphics cards in SLI, there is one PCI slot left open.

            One of the more interesting decisions is to include Firewire 1394B support.  Instead of the regular 1394A which runs at 400 Mb/sec transfers, 1394B enables 800 Mb/sec transfers.  While this sounds good, there is a fly in the ointment.  Under Windows XP 1394B support is somewhat broken.  While it works, transfers are often slightly lower and utilize more CPU cycles than the 1394A standard.  This support looks to be fixed in Windows XP Professional 64 as well as Windows Vista.  Few consumer applications utilize 1394B, but it is a nice option to have for future products.

            In terms of slots the board does very well.  It features 2 x 16X PCI-E slots for graphics (both 16X electrical), one 1X PCI-E slot, and one 4X PCI-E slot.  It rounds out the bottom with the two PCI slots.  When using a dual slot graphics card the 1X slot is totally occluded.  Because this is an enthusiast style product, one has to wonder why it was even included on the board.  The 4X slot is handy, especially with the latest SATA RAID controllers as well as future physics processing units that will utilize PCI-E.  The second PCI-E 16X slot can handle another graphics card or any other PCI-E device.  Expansion with this board is not really a problem, especially considering its already robust integrated features.  The one annoyance with the PEG slots is the retention mechanism.  With a dual slot cooler, it is exceedingly hard to get fingers into the tight space to reach the retention clip.  With patience it can be done, but it certainly is an annoying way to do it.  I much prefer the MSI units without the locking retention mechanism.

Note the 2.0 at the end of the tag.  It is good to see the engineers updating the original reference design.

            LinkBoost is an officially sanctioned overclocking setting that works with specific NVIDIA based graphics cards.  Originally this only worked with the 7900 GTX boards, but now it appears to work with the 8800 series as well.  The 7950 GX2 was not supported due to its PCI-E switch.  This overclocks the PEG bus and HyperTransport bus to allow for more bandwidth between the video cards.  This apparently has little overall effect on performance, and is a feature that is not really pushed forward as much as when it was originally introduced.

Next:  More Board

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