Our next three benchmarks are from SiSoft Sandra 2007 Pro.  These include the Processor Arithmetic Bench, the Processor Multi-Media Bench and the Memory Bandwidth Benchmark.  As you will see below, the nForce 590 chipset certainly holds its own as far as SiSoft Sandra is concerned.

A simple and straight forward benchmark.  Super Pi is coded to calculate the value of Pi to a certain preselected digit.  In our instance here, to the two millionth digit and record how long it takes a system to do this.  I was expecting some truly astonishing results but only ended up with 2M clocking in at 90 seconds.

Gaming is one of those benchmarking issues where lots of sites tread lightly.  Here at the OCC, we choose not to tread lightly and speak our mind freely.  A true gaming benchmark to test a product's quality for gaming, should be a game - end of story.  A synthetic benchmark can give you an indication of feature implementation but not actual gameplay.  I want to say this to explain our using FutureMark's 3D Mark 2006 here.  In the absence of an apples to apples comparison product, a FRAPS frame graph isn't going to do anything for you.  As far as this mainboard is concerned and because we don't have any direct comparison units to use, we are using FutureMark to give you at least a flavor of what performance we are seeing.

Fox Live

Earlier we mentioned some rather exciting software Foxconn and NVidia have and have included with the Foxconn C51XEM2AA mainboard.  The first is Foxconn's LiveUpdate program.  BIOS, Drivers and Utilities are all updateable at the touch of a button and all from within a Window's environment.  The Foxconn program made updating the board's BIOS and drivers an absolute breeze.  I'll never, EVER, purchase a board without this type of feature on it for personal use again.  Here's a quick shot of what the menu screen looks like.  Again, kudos to Foxconn for being so careful to make their menus so intuitive.  Nice job.

NVidia nTune

Now the heart of the show.  Maybe I've been asleep behind the wheel but I had not yet played with any of NVidia's nTune program until this review.  Look at the window below and you will figure out exactly what I mean.

All from within a window's environment!  Motherboard settings, GPU settings and Dynamic BIOS adjustment are all available right here.  Remember, I said the lack of smart fan controls or trips within the BIOS was no big deal because...?  Look to the right side of the first pic below.  nTune has it all!  A picture is says it all in this case!

Last we have nTune's automatic overclocking program that does a lot more than just feel out some megahertz.  Three options are offered, Course (takes approx 20mins), Fine (can take up to three hours) and a manual custom setting.  Not only with the click of a button is the CPU overclocked but so is the PCI-E bus and the VGA's core and memory clock.  What was nice was that the overclocking settings it arrived at matched nicely to the ones I had done by hand earlier for both the CPU and the CPU. 

BACK                    NEXT

Pg 1 - Introduction / What you get
Pg 2 - Layout
Pg 3 - Layout / BIOS
Pg 4 - BIOS / Performance
Pg 5 - Performance / Fox Liveupdate / NVidia nTune
Pg 6 - Overclocking / Conclusion