Foxconn C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H

INTRODUCTION

When AMD released their new AM2 CPU’s NVIDIA was quick out from the starting block with their nForce5 chipset. Among the first motherboards, in fact probably the very first, was Foxconn with their imaginary named C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H. They were probably first since the motherboard also was the reference motherboard from NVIDIA.
As the chosen motherboard to display all the might and glory of the nForce5 chipset, the C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H is a motherboard filled with features and also one of the few fully supporting the nTune-software from NVIDIA.

NFORCE 5

The Foxconn C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H uses the top of the line chipset in the nForce 5 family, the nForce590.  

Just as they did with the nForce 4, NVIDIA has filled the nForce 5 with lots of (on paper) cool features.

46 PCI-E lanes on the high-end nForce 590 chipset.
18 from the SPP and the rest from the MCP. This means you got 2x16x lanes for two video cards in SLI

Linkboost
Linkboost is another feature only available on the nForce 590. When the nForce 590 SLi chipset senses that you have a certified video card in the system (right now a 7900GTX) it automatically overclocks the PCI Express (PCIe) and MCP HyperTransport (HT) bus speeds by 25%. It does sound great but in actual tests the performance wasn’t really different with Linkboost on or off. A lot of other factors decide the performance and in the end increasing this bandwidth doesn’t really do much.

Note that the link between the SPP and CPU still is 8 Gb/s

SLI Memory
Enhanced Performance Profiles, or EPP, is an open standard, PC initiative designed to provide higher levels of system performance by integrating additional high-performance capabilities into their SDRAM DIMM modules. Developed as an extension to the traditional JEDEC standard Serial Presence Detect (SPD) found on today’s high-performance DIMMS, new Enhanced Performance Profiles (EPP) simplifies the overclocking of memory DIMMs, while at the same time ensuring platform and component compatibility. The benefits for the beginner include good introduction to tweaking and a guaranteed success with their first overclock. For the expert, EPP provides a good basecamp to begin overclocking by moving “ground zero” two-thirds up the mountain for the sophisticated overclocker.

The NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI chipset is the first core logic to introduce support for this new specification. The system BIOS will automatically recognize the presence of a DIMM that supports EPP. Upon boot-up, the BIOS will flag detection of these DIMMs to users. A user has the ability to enable or disable EPP support in the SBIOS using the SLI-Ready Memory option.

Memories that run at much higher speeds above 800MHz, such as Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5, will require CPU overclocking to achieve the 1066 MHz memory frequency the device is capable of operating at. This may require increasing CPU voltage and increasing CPU frequency. Due to manufacturing process variations of CPUs, some CPUs might not be very overclockable while others might very well be. By incrementally increasing and testing the percentage of CPU overclocking in the SLI-Ready Memory BIOS setting, the user will be able to capture higher system performance.

First Packet
Essentially, FirstPacket™ is packet prioritization — it allows users to set network data packets for applications and games that are more latency sensitive with a higher priority. For applications, FirstPacket™ technology gives users much more flexibility in how they may use their computers, allowing them to successfully do more things at the same time. For games, FirstPacket™ is about response time. FirstPacket™ delivers a predictable online gaming experience by treating gaming network packets more importantly than other network packets that can saturate a limited DSL or Cable broadband connection, such as FTP packets.

Any application that tends to use small packets and requires bounded end-to-end latency will benefit from FirstPacket technology. Any networked game, plus voice over IP, video over IP, and any interactive applications (network meetings, like WebEx) will benefit. The benefit is achieved by forcing the latency-tolerant applications to wait a bit longer to access the wire. This is a good trade-off, since the user has indicated that their preference is to have the latency-sensitive applications be given priority over the other applications.

DualNet
The nForce 5 offers two Gigabit Ethernet controllers on the same chip. These can be run independently as well as combined.

Teaming
Teaming allows the two integrated network connections to work together, appearing as a single network connection while providing up to twice the Ethernet bandwidth for transferring large amounts of data from home file servers to other PCs. Teaming also provides network redundancy through fail-over capability. By hooking up Ethernet connections to both gigabit ports, not only is performance increased by combining the two pipes, but the network is instantly protected against port or cable failure (such as a network wire getting kicked loose.)

TCP/IP acceleration
NVIDIA TCP/IP acceleration is a networking solution that includes both a dedicated processor for accelerating networking traffic processing and hardware-optimized software. TCP/IP acceleration provides deep levels of networking and traffic inspections at full-duplex gigabit Ethernet speeds. By offloading CPU-intensive packet processing tasks in hardware, TCP/IP acceleration delivers the highest system performance. If you use this feature however you cannot use any third party firewall.

MediaShield
The nForce 590 and 570 now features 3 SATA controllers with dual PHYs that can run at 1.5 GB/s or 3.0 GB/s. This gives you support for 6 SATA drivers that can be set up in various RAID-configurations: RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and RAID 5. Since you now have support for 6 SATA drives you can run multiple RAID 5 arrays or even a massive RAID 5 array.

If the support for SATA drives have increased, the support for PATA (IDE) drives have decreased. Instead of 2 PATA-ports you now only have support for 1 PATA-port. This can be negative to anyone still running a bunch of old IDE-drives or with a bunch of optical drives.

High-Definition Audio
The nForce 5 now supports the various “Azalia” High Definition Audio codecs.

nTune 5
The updated nTune application now has even more features:

• Manually control bus speeds (FSB or HTT and AGP or PCI-E), fan speeds, memory timings, and voltages of the motherboard.
• Manually control the 3D core and memory bus speeds and the fan speeds for GeForce series (3x and higher) graphics cards.
• Automatically tune the system and graphics performance.
• Dynamically load saved settings for different performance states.
• Monitor system performance data such as bus speeds, temperatures, and voltage levels.
• Perform stability tests to verify tuning results.
• Change BIOS settings from within Windows.
• View detailed SW and HW version information.

As with previous versions the motherboard vendors will have to add support for some of the features. As an example the Foxconn motherboard has full nTune support and allow you to dynamically change bios settings while the ASUS motherboard has limited support.

As you can see NVIDIA has added a lot of cool features with the nForce 5. Some of the features are only available on the high-end nForce 590 chipset.