Overclocking

The cat's out of the bag already to some degree but doing things by hand from within the BIOS we were able to jack our system up to 230MHz.  This may be the limit of our chip so unfortunately, I can't tell you for certain what we are hitting the wall with, the board or the processor.  I can tell you that I have seen this board reviewed elsewhere and it consistently hits a much higher mark making me think the limitation is our chip and not the Foxconn mainboard.

Conclusion

With AMD's new socket AM2 and DDR2 on the table, I almost expected this to be a "test the waters" type of NVidia chipset.  Maybe it is in some respects but as far as I'm concerned, take the plunge.  Foxconn's implementation of the NVidia 590 SLI chipset is fantastic.  Foxconn has been around for a very long time; long enough to recognize a winner reference design and keep the tweaking to a minimum.  They have included a fantastic bundle of cables and the like and let us not forget the Fox Update.  Performance, stability and ease of setup earned the Foxconn C51XEM2AA high marks but adding in Foxconn's online BIOS/Driver/Utility live update features along with NVidia's nTune which makes overclocking as easy as clicking the "Tune" key, they have a bon-a-fide winner in blue.

The only item of note is that of DIMM 1 if the end user wants to go with an oversized cooler.  Check and measure twice before you do.  Aside from that, which can be blamed on a heatsink manufacturer just as easily as the board, this is a winner board in a big way.  SLI, DDR2, six SATA II connections, up to 10 USB ports, dual Gigabit LAN, Fox Live Update, NVidia nTune automatic overclocking/tweaking for CPU, VGA, PCI-E bus, digital error code display and on and on...  If you are looking to take the AM2 plunge, take it now, take it with this board, the water isn't deep and you won't need a lifeguard.  Kudos to Foxconn.  Great job!

Pros:

• Excellent performance

• Rock solid stability

• Fantastic bundle

• SLI Ready

• Chipset cooler fashion show winner

• Error code display

• Auxiliary reset and power buttons mounted on the board itself

• True high definition audio

• 10 USB ports possible

• IEEE1394a and IEEE1394b jacks

• RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD

• Brings DDR2 to AMD

• Foxconn's Liveupdate program

• NVidia nTune is fantastic!

Cons:

• DIMM slots too close to socket – heatsink compatibility