Introduction

AMD Athlon 64 has now taken the back seat in the CPU war for the most powerful CPU per watt environment. Once the king of the mountain in many aspects, AMD has now had to hand this title over to Intel once again with the Core architecture really making a big name for itself.

While not able to technically challenge the Core 2 for highest scores in the performance benchmarks, AMD’s line-up of Athlon processors are still a great for their dollar value. AMD still holds the crown for cheapest high-end desktop CPU and there are many chipsets available to support the K8 architecture, most notably coming from nVidia.

nVidia has been the biggest success story of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. First taking on 3DFX for the most popular and powerful 3D graphics processor, they now have a strong platform to build on, that being the nForce chipset range for both AMD and Intel processors.

The highest offering from nVidia for AMD Athlon K8 is the nForce 590SLI boasting dual full-speed PCI Express x16 slots, advanced RAID features and overclocking that manages to score really high for the AMD platform. nVidia did announce the upcoming nForce 680a chipset and we are interested to see what that will bring but we have heard anything about motherboards based on this chipset as yet.

Today we are looking at the nForce 590SLI chipset in a motherboard from EPoX, one of the biggest AMD supporters since the K7 era. EPoX back in the day made some of the best overclocking motherboards that money could buy but recently fell off the horse a little recently but is it time for them to make a comeback with their fancy Optimus EP-AF590 SLI2 Motherboard?

Let’s continue on and see what the folks at EPoX have to offer!