Of the three Socket AM2 boards we had by today's release the nForce 590 SLI based Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe certainly is the flashiest. We have three of these boards, two 1.02g revisions, and one 1.03g. The 1.03g has 1066MHz support with the 0401 or 0402 BIOS. It includes a myriad of features including an elaborate heatpipe, SLI, dual Gigabit, HD audio, on 802.11g, It includes a myriad of overclocking options, and looks like another top board from Asus. This is the board AMD sent with its review sample CPUs.
Now before we get to the scores keep this in mind. Asus has a setting for SLI memory to be set to high frequency. This sets the memory to 1066MHz. Well, not exactly. This sets the multiplier for the FX62 from 14X to 11, and the reference clock from 200MHz, to 254MHz. So what does this give you?
Well if you click on the nTune 4.0 system information panel you see that the HyperTransport multiplier is set to 4X, and that the memory ends up at 1016MHz, and the CPU just under 2.8GHz. So what we have effectively is overclocking, and not an official setting for DDR2 800. Previous BIOS versions for the Asus had a RSVD setting we had thought was 1066MHz that we could not get to work. Those were on 1.02g version boards. We have been told by Corsair that a version 1.03g board at at least the 0401 BIOS is needed for the 1066MHz option. In reality you can just overclock the system bus to 254MHz, and set the multiplier to 11X for the FX62 and have almost the same result. So the 1066MHz benchmarks you see below are in reality 1016MHz DDR, and the bus is slightly overclocked.