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.