Our Chinese Freelancer friend Windwithme shares his first hand-on experience with the upcoming socket AM2 socket from AMD, the NDA is set for 23rd this month (if that date doesn’t change, again), so while he isn’t allowed to share final benchmark numbers yet, he does have some teaser shots from the upcoming SLI motherboard from MSI, which is based on the nVidia 5xx series Chipset.

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Introducing the first AMD AM2 board from MSI, the K9N SLI Platinum sees the light of day. AMD K8 has maintained its lead in CPU performance in the past two years from the single channel S754 followed by the dual channel S939, and now AMD is beginning to fill the market with yet another new socket in the second quarter of 2006.

940-pin Socket AM2. From the low price market leader Sempron to the high end FX series they all utilize DDR2 and AMD establishes pricing coverage for all levels of user, from low- to high-end.

The main subject of this preview is the MSI K9N SLI Platinum which differs from the original engineering sample in several areas;

Sufficient separation between the two PCIe

Provision for 3 PCI expansion slots

Dual Gigabit NIC connections

7.1 Channel Audio

Firewire 1394

6 SATAII provide RAID 0,1,0+1

6 USB 2.0

CMOS clear/reset PIN

Two pairs of DDRII memory slots

Standard IDE & 24-pin main power cable



MOSFETS passive heatsink is an improvement over the S939/754, in the near future we will find out its practical application/performance.

I/O Plate:

Consists of 4 USB 2.0 ports

Dual LAN/WAN and 7.1 Channel Audio



From Mikeshardware we know that:

nVidia nForce 500 series chipset for the AM2 platform is expected to be released Mid 2006. The successor to the nForce 4 series, the nForce 500 is based around the same design, but with an enhanced featureset. nForce 500 chipsets will feature support for a fixed version of nVidia's ActiveArmor networking technology (eliminating the data corruption problems found with the CPU offload of nForce 4), MediaShield storage technology (Dual RAID-5 support), Quad SLI support, 10 x USB 2 ports and 6 x SATA 3Gb/s ports. The nForce 500 series is initially expected to consist of the following members:

nForce 590 SLI - Dual GPU, Enthusiast

nForce 570 SLI - Dual GPU, Performance

nForce 570 - Single GPU, Performance

nForce 550 - Single GPU, Mainstream