Introduction

With the introduction of Intel’s’ Core 2 Duo, AMD has been beaten performance wise when it comes to high-end market segment. In the lower budget market AMD has still a decent piece of the pie.

It has not only the reputation of the well know Athlon 64 architecture that has proven itself before, but also the price advantage. In my opinion Intel doesn’t really have a CPU that fits in that segmentation of the market.

Today we’ll be testing a DFI NF590 SLI-M2R/G. This is a mainboard for AMD AM2 CPU. In combination with an Athlon 64 3500+ we’ll take a closer look at this board. This review will consist out of several parts.

First we’ll take a look at the board itself and the features it has to offer. As much as possible we’ll try to do some testing on these parts.

Secondly basic performance testing. What can we expect performance wise of this system. Besides some of the very known and popular benchmark utilities we’ll do some game testing, photo editing.

Then it’s time for the real work. The overclocking. DFI is a widely known brand when it comes to overclocking. Has this changed and will this board meet our high expectations. These tests will be compared with the test results at default speeds. Does overclocking benefit with this test platform.

Finally we’ll compare some of the results with the outcome of an Intel E6300 test platform. Does it really let the AMD bite the dust? And we’ll take some other parameters such as price and power usage in account.

And finally we’ll sum everything up in a conclusion.



As test setup we will be using:

Test Setup
CPU	AMD Athlon 64 AM2 3500+
Mainboard	DFI NF590 SLI-M2R/G
Video cards	EVGA 7800 GT CO
Memory	2 * 1024 Mb DDR2 PC7200 EPP OCZ
Other	OCZ 600 watt Nec 2050 DVD writer Hitachi 500 Gb SATA

Intel test platform was the same, but with E6300 and Abit AB9 mainboard

On to the first part of this review. Let’s take a look at the board.

What do we get?

The board we tested today makes part of the Lanparty series. Designed to impress, and not only performance wise.

The board is quit colorfully. The dimm sockets, cpu bracket and extension slots are in a bright yellow and orange color, there are also yellow sata cables and rounded IDE and FDD cables provided in the box.


Click for larger picture

The usual equipment such as manual, driver CD end floppy, SLI Bridge. Last but not least we found a little piece of PCB with audio jacks on it. More about this later.

Board overview

General board remarks

This board supports every AM2 based cpu out there. AM2 is the successor of the very popular socket 939. Why has AMD chosen to change a socket? Mid 2006 AMD came with DDR2 memory support. Not only new boards were needed, but also a new series of processors. This is because AMD Athlon 64 CPUs have an integrated memory controller. The motherboard chipset has basically nothing to do anymore with the memory/cpu subsystem. To avoid that people would buy a DDR2 oriented processor but a DDR compatible board the new AM2 socket was brought to life.

AMD® Athlon 64 FX / Athlon 64 X2 / Athlon 64

Socket AM2

2000MT/s HyperTransport interface

This DFI board is using the fastest chipset based on the Nvidia Nforce 5 series: 590 SLI. This chipset exists out of two other chips:

NVIDIA nForce® 590 SLI MCP
- Northbridge: NVIDIA® C51XE
- Southbridge: NVIDIA® MCP55PXE

You can install up to 4 gigabyte of memory on this board, divided over four DDR2 DIMM sockets. Officially this board supports memory up to 800 Mhz and in 128 bit wide dual channel mode. Later on in his review we’ll take a look and see what we can squeeze out of this board using some high end DDR2 sticks.

As already mentioned this board supports SLI. This means that on this board you can install up to two NVIDIA video cards and pair them together. These can theoretically double the performance. Therefore there are 2 PCI Express slots available, both delivering the full 16x bandwidth at any time. An overview:

2 PCI Express x16 slots

1 PCI Express x1 slot

1 PCI Express x8 slot

3 PCI slots

There's more ->

On board peripherals



A lot of expansion slots are available, but will they be of any use? Perhaps you’ll need more serial ata ports? A sound card? Perhaps a netword card? Let’s take a look what this board has before we’ll start thinking about expanding it.

At first sight there are no audio ports available. This is due to the fact that DFI adds a little card that needs to be plugged in next to the PS2 ports. It’s called the Karajan audio module.

Karajan audio module - Realtek ALC885 8-channel High Definition Audio CODEC - 6 audio jacks - 1 CD-in connector - 1 front audio connector

DAC SNR/ADC SNR of 106dB/101dB

Full-rate lossless content protection technology

S/PDIF-in/out interface

The board also offers two gigabit network cards. One comes integrated with the Nforce 5 chipset. For the second one DFI added an extra LAN controller chip to create the second port.

NVIDIA® MCP55PXE integrated with Gigabit MAC (Media Access Control) technology

Two Vitesse VSC8601 Gigabit Phy chips

Fully compliant to IEEE 802.3 (10BASE-T), 802.3u (100BASE-TX) and 802.3ab (1000BASE-T) standards

Not only LAN is the only communication interface, there are also two firewire ports.

VIA VT6307

Supports two 100/200/400 Mb/sec ports

You can also connect other devices trough one of the ten USB 2.0 port. Six of these ports are available from the I/O back panel of the mainboard. 4 others can be connected on the mainboard trough a PCI bracket or to the front of your case.

Internally there are also a lot of storage connection possibilities. For starters we have the six SATA ports that are supported by the Nforce 5 chipset, supporting a lot of RAID options.

If that wasn’t enough, DFI added a promise chip to take care of two extra SATA ports. What I’m missing, and what can be found as well on rather budget minded boards is the e-SATA plug. A sata port in the I/O panel to connect directly to an external SATA disk.

Six Serial ATA ports supported by NVIDIA® MCP55PXE - SATA speed up to 3Gb/s - RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and RAID 5

Two Serial ATA ports supported by Silicon Image SiI 3132 - SATA speed up to 3Gb/s - RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1

One IDE connector allows connecting up to two UltraDMA 133Mbps hard drives. Though we have a lot of sata ports present I think a lot of people would like to see the two extra sata ports replaced by one IDE connector instead.

An older hard disk drive and a DVD writer directly use up two IDE ports, now you’re almost forced to change your IDE disks to SATA disks.



Extra features

This board is aiming towards the enthusiast market.

Monitors CPU/system/chipset temperature

Monitors 12V/5V/3.3V/Vcore/Vbat/5Vsb/Vdimm/Vchip voltages

Monitors the speed of the cooling fans

CPU Overheat Protection function monitors CPU temperature during system boot-up

Five fan headers

1 Debug LED. This is a two digit character display. During the POST process it shows a number of codes. If it halts on a specific code you know immediately what part or setting is faulty.

EZ touch switches (power switch and reset switch)

For the less overclocking minded there’s also something; DFI has yet again chosen for a rather colorful board.

Time for some first tests ->

Basic performance

Futuremark tests

We'll be starting with the 3DMarks series from Futureùarl. The scores you'll find below are normal, perhaps a tad on the lower side. We're missing a bit of CPU power in these synthetic benchmarks. You can compare these scores on the FuturemarkORB (Online result Browser) or the HWbot

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Game tests

Gaming time! The DFI combined with the AMD 3500+ is well capable of playing games at high resolution and detail settings. I also added some low resolution benchmarks, as these are more CPU (and board) dependent to use afterwards.

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Superpi

Not much to say about these results. They seem on the slow side. But we're not really used to see this benchmark tool being ran at defaults settings. More results for later...

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Photoshop

Driverheaven made this pretty nifty PhotoShop Benchmark which is basically a collection of actions performed on an image and the time measured for each operation.

Using Adobe Photoshop CS 2 we ran trough this benchmark in 215,1 seconds.

This board surely isn’t made to be used stock speeds, so on to the overclocking ->

Overclocking & BIOS



In the DFI BIOS you’ll find almost every possible setting you could use to overclock or tweak your configuration. Let’s take a quick look at the most commonly used ones.

Voltages

The cpu vid, the actual core voltage, can be selected from 1,0 volt up to 1,6 Volt in steps of 0,005 volt. This makes it possible to select very precisely what voltage you want. If that wouldn’t be enough there is also the CPU VID Special Add. With that you can raise the actual voltage up to 121% (starting at 100% in steps of 0,1 %). Meaning you can supply the cpu up to a very nice 1,94 volt.



Frequencies

The multiplier of Athlon 64 processors is unlocked downwards (except for the Athlon FX series). With this particular CPU you can choose any multiplier from 4x up to 11x (the default setting.)

The CPU/C51 HTT Frequency, which is the bus the CPU uses to communicate with the rest of the system can be set from 100 up to 500 in steps of 2.

Both the 16x PCIe slots speed can also be chosen and changed independently.




Extra - other

DFI added the possibility to work with overclocking profiles in BIOS. And of course you also have the monitoring menu.




And finally we have the memory timings:




Obtained results

With the very flexible BIOS I could squeeze out a nifty 340 HTT speeds. But the memory speed wasn't ideal using this setting. Using the 1:2 DDR:Memory "divider" I could reach up to 600 Mhz DDR at timings cas 4 -4-4-10. I had to push about 2.6 Volt through the memory. But this was all possible trough BIOS. No special modifications were needed.

In the end I settled at a HTT speed of 290 Mhz and a memory speed of 580 Mhz (4-4-4-10). Higher clock speeds were possible, but not using air-cooling.


Performance



With the 3d mark with can already see the differences. The older the 3d mark, the more CPU dependency we see.

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And so we see it in the games....

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Now the extra 700 Mhz cpu can be noticed the most with the SuperPi tests. Using the 1M setting we drop from 39 second to about 28 seconds.

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The performance increases we're seeing here below in the Sisoft Sandra tests seem to have pretty well reflected into the other applications tested above. From 20 to 30% increase is surely not bad.

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Photoshop

Driverheaven made this pretty nifty PhotoShop Benchmark which is basically a collection of actions performed on an image and the time measured for each operation.

Using Adobe Photoshop CS 2 we ran trough this benchmark in 167,1 seconds with the overclocked configuration. About 25% faster.

How does it compare to Core 2 ? ->

Comparison to Intels’ latest

For these test series I used the one of the cheaper Core 2 models, the E6300.

At default clockspeeds the AMD 3500+ is no match for the Core 2 E6300. But when overclocked it can hold its own quit well. The newer benchmarks are rather in favor of the E6300 which has two cores....




In SuperPi both the chips are on par performance wise. Keep in mind that the AMD needs to be overclocked to keep up with the Core 2.



Let's take a look at some other aspects of the DFI/AM2 platform and sum things up.->

Power usage

The AMD Athlon 64 is based on a technology that's about 3 years old. And while newer chip manufacturing technologies have been used, the 90nm process uses noticeably more power that the 65nm based Intel Core 2 processors.

Overclocked the AMD smokes the Intel. Literally…



Pricing

This DFI motherboard is on the rather expensive side at about €200. But the AMD A64 3500+ I used in this review can be bought for just 85 euro. Making a total of 285 euro and for that price you get one of the most complete and performing mainboards in a working AMD AM2 platform.

I paid 180 euro for the Core 2 Duo E6300 and €135 for the ABIT AB9 mainboard. This setup totals 325 euro. For this price you get a mid range though feature rich board with on of the cheaper Core 2 Duo CPUs.

For 45 euro more you get a core duo configuration that manages to perform equal to or sometimes outperform the heavily tweaked A64 setup. The A64 has support for NVIDIA SLI, something the Abit lacks, of course there are Core 2 mainboards that can provide you the same amount of features and the possibility to use two VGA cards. But then we’re talking immediately in a 200 euro price range when it comes to the mainboard.
Using such one with the Core 2 config would easily cost 100 euro more….

Keep in mind that the Core 2 was not overclocked in this article. If it would be, let’s say to 2,8 or 3 Ghz (which is not really a problem for this setup) it would seriously outperform the AM2 config.

Conclusion

The AMD A64 platform surely isn't dead yet. But buying it nowadays for a high end setup would not be recommended. If you’re using a limited budget you'll sure enjoy the overall AMD price points advantage CPU wise, while the DFI doesn’t quite fit into this budget category. If you’re already a happy owner of an AMD processor (AM2) and want to seek the maximum performance the Lanparty NF590-SLI is an excellent choice.

If you already made the switch to Intel or are looking to buy higher end with Core 2, you’d be interested to know DFI has a high end ATI R600 based motherboard out which features more tweaking options than any board before. Local forum member Windwithme did several overclocking tests of this board and also the DFI Intel P965 based Infinity board:

DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200 T2R/G with ATI RD600 chipset

DFI infinity with Intel 965 chipset

More DFI + RD600

I would like to thank Zach from DFI - Diamond Flower Industries for providing us this sample.