AMD FX-62 & Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5

AM2 is here, and armed with an FX-62, we see how it stacks up.

You’d think the AM2 launch would be all about AMD – you’d think this, but you’d be wrong. It’s all about NVIDIA, and it’s making sure the world knows about it with the company’s new ‘SLI certified’ program and nForce 500 series of motherboards. Even CPU fans are able to grab themselves the ‘Recommended by NVIDIA’ moniker.

What this means is that NVIDIA is now able to present a complete platform under its banner by teaming up with selected partners, so you know that the hardware you’re buying will perform to a minimum spec. It’s also utter marketing genius, and it will be interesting to see how ATI responds – its Xpress 3200 by the way, is already compatible with AM2 – and we should be seeing those shortly. They won’t be featuring the ULI chips though – ATI has had to update the southbridge itself to the SB600 thanks to the NVIDIA buyout.

We were sent a Foxconn AM2 board, based on NVIDIA’s nForce 590 SLI chipset, along with a Zalman CNPS9500 AM2 cooler, and 2GB of Corsair DDR2 6400 (4-4-4-12), all which had received the big green stamp of approval.

Unfortunately, the Foxconn board we received simply didn’t want Windows installed on it – thankfully Gigabyte came to the rescue, supplying their own 590 SLI board.

We were also sent the nForce 9.34 and Forceware 91.28 drivers, as well as nTune 5.00.03.06. Both Forceware and nTune have received massive upgrades, although the former, despite being pretty, is impossible to navigate unless you turn on the ‘Classic’ navigation panel. Looks like NVIDIA inherited some Microsoft software engineers.

The most obvious change for AM2 is the socket. 940 pins are the standard, but with a different pinout from the previous Socket 940 so things don’t get confusing. Those with Socket 939 coolers that use clips to hook on to the bracket can still use them here (although there’s only one hook instead of three on each side). Those with big tower-like coolers that come with their own retention brackets are going to have to find another solution, as the holes in the board are in different places.

Also new, of course, is the support for DDR2 memory (certain spurious sources claim DDR3, although this remains to be seen), and AMD’s virtualisation technology. We can’t wait for some finalised software to test it out, and pit it against Intel’s solution.



Gigabyte’s board layout is excellent, with no real gripes except the usual lack of PCI slots if you throw in two dual slot video cards. Speaking of which, Gigabyte has now mastered the PCI-E release clip, being the best we’ve used.

An interesting inclusion is a PCI-E x8 slot, indicating that the market is finally starting to move on the new technology.

New from NVIDIA in the 500 series is LinkBoost, essentially guaranteed overclocking of the PCI-E bus and HyperTransport link between the northbridge and southbridge by 25% (currently this only works with 7900 GTXs); DualNet – the ability to combine both Gigabit Ethernet ports as a single entity to increase your network throughput; FirstPacket – an attempt to prioritise outbound gaming traffic; SLIready memory support for EPP (Enhanced Performance Profile) enabled RAM; and support for six SATA drives all of which can be configured for straight usage, RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5. Unfortunately, SoundStorm hasn’t returned, with the Realtek HD codec replacing AC97 for good. NVIDIA also claims to have fixed the data corruption problems with its firewall, however we didn’t have time to test this properly.

Possibly the most exciting feature for Atomicans is NVIDIA’s BIOS, with enough options to make even the most devout DFI fan start quivering at the knees. You can set boot priority on all devices, not just hard drives, voltages are ridiculously tweakable, and of course it supports EPP, a new joint Corsair/NVIDIA ‘standard’ that allows the SPD chip on RAM to store extra settings beyond the JEDEC spec, including drive strengths and voltages to aid in overclocking.

Unfortunately, Gigabyte and other vendors have chosen to eschew the crazily configurable NVIDIA BIOS in favour of their own – the Foxconn board being the only one we’ve seen so far that has included it.

For testing, we used an FX-62, Corsair 6400 (4-4-4-12) and 8500 (5-5-5-12) with EPP, and for comparison our standard AMD FX-60 testbench first at standard clocks, and then at 2.79GHz by overclocking the HTT frequency to 215MHz. Both boards were fitted with a pair of 7900 GTXs.

With the relatively low latency DDR2 the FX-62 was able to strip out the overclocked FX-60, although not by much. Hopefully latencies will drop fairly rapidly, or AMD could be seeing some interesting times in the face of Intel’s Conroe.

AM2 is very much a minor evolution, and not a revolution for now – but we’ll see where the future takes us. To quad core and beyond!