AMD Socket AM2 Family Preview
Even with the slew of new Athlon 64, Athlon 64 X2, and Sempron processors being released today, the socket itself, and all of the other AMD blitzing taking place, a new Chipset is not really needed. Due to the physical changes though with the socket and memory interface, a new motherboard will be required, unless of course using one of ASRock's unique AM2 upgradeable products. Speaking of ASRock's upgradeable motherboards, the AM2 upgrade port for the 939Dual-SATA2 and 939SLI32-eSATA2 will be on display during Computex, and will be available shortly.
The members for the nForce 500 series becoming available today include the nForce 590 SLI, nForce 570 SLI, nForce 570, and nForce 550. The SLI models of course denote the Scalable Link Interface possibilities for multiple GPUs. The NVIDIA nForce 500 series is the successor to the ever-popular nForce 4 series. The features between the two generations remain close, but the 500 series does boast several enhanced options. These improvements largely consist of a fixed NVIDIA ActiveArmor, MediaShield Storage with dual RAID 5 support, quad SLI support (on supportive SLI Chipsets), ten USB 2.0 ports, and six Serial ATA 2.0 ports. One of the enhancements to the nForce 590 Chipset is "LinkBoost" -- which is designed to increase the bandwidth between the GPU and the MCP, if the system uses NVIDIA-only components (GPUs and Chipset). Yet another enhancement in the new NVIDIA line-up is "FirstPacket" for integration with NVIDIA ActiveArmor at an attempt of creating packet prioritization and Quality of Service control. The nForce 500 series is soon expected to have a variant compatible with Intel's LGA-775 processor.
Last week ATI Technologies had released the Radeon Xpress 1100 Chipset for use with AMD notebooks, however, this part can also be used with desktop systems running AM2 processors. The ATI Xpress 1100 and Xpress 1150 integrates faster graphics (X300 core), and a handful of additional optimizations. ECS Elitegroup has been first to adopt the Xpress 1100 RS5 Chipset on a micro-ATX motherboard, which they will sell as the ECS RS5M-M. The Southbridge used by ECS was the SB460. Starting today, we should begin to see additional RS485 and RD580 motherboards boasting compatibility with AM2 support. The ATI SB600 will also be announced at Computex, with some of the features being Serial ATA 2.0 with RAID capabilities, ten USB 2.0 ports, and high definition audio. The SB600 should also heighten the performance abilities of ATI-driven systems. SiS and VIA will also be throwing new AMD AM2-supportive Chipsets into the hardware mix as well.
Of the motherboards being released today, and in the coming days at Computex Taipei, is tentatively the Epox MF570 SLI AM2, ABIT Fatal1ty AN9 32X, ABIT KN9 SLI, ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe, MSI K9N Diamond, MSI K9N Neo-F, MSI K9N Platinum, MSI K9N SLI Platinum, MSI K9N SLI-2F, MSI K9N Ultra-2F, and Gigabyte M59SLI-S5. Of course, there are many more motherboards coming out not listed here that will support the AM2 processors.