The upcoming nForce5 chipset, supporting AMD's move to AM2, will be available in different flavours. At the very top, replete with a bunch of bells and whistles, will be the nForce 590. Sporting an MCP55XE northbridge and C51XE southbridge, ABIT's AN9 Fatal1ty 32X runs with 6 native SATA2 ports, high-definition audio, AM2 CPU support (S940, remember) and twin x16 PCIe lanes for multi-GPU SLI performance. Note that x16 bandwidth is available to each slot.
ABIT's Silent OTES system is quite as silent as it could be, with twin 40mm fans on the I/O section. Other features include dual Gigabit LAN, 10 USB2.0 ports, ABIT's in-house uGuru technology and expansion in the form of 2x PCIe and a single PCI slot. ABIT will also bundle in its Guru Panel. It's worth repeating that the nForce 590 chipset run with DDR2 memory, so not only will you need a processor upgrade to AM2 socket Athlon 940, you'll need to purchase, if you haven't got it already, some tasty DDR2 RAM that will run at high frequencies
If recent Fatal1ty motherboards are the yardstick to go by the Fatal1ty AN9 32X will do well.
Users looking for a cheaper solution without board-mounted fans and extreme overclocking measures may consider the K9N Ultra, based on the nForce 570 SLI chipset and sporting 'only' x8 PCIe bandwidth on each x16 slot when used in SLI mode.
