Gigabyte M59SLI-S5 Motherboard

The M59SLI-S5 is a power-packed performance board for the AMD platform. It

supports Athlon FX 64 and X2 processors, and its socket is AM2 compatible. Based

on the nVIDIA nForce 590 SLI chipset, it has 4 DIMM slots that support upto 16

GB of DDR2 800 MHz RAM. The board has Dolby Digital sound.

We tested the board with Athlon FX 62, 1 GB RAM and an nVIDIA GeForce 7800

GTX graphics card. It scored 6299 on the PCMark '05 system test suite,

substantially less than the ECS KA3MVP (6343 points), reviewed recently. In

3DMark the margins were faint, with this board scoring 7980 to KA3MVP's

7946. 

Price: Rs 11,000 (3 yr warranty) Meant For: High-end users, gamers Key Specs: Socket AM2, DDR2 800, 8-channel High-Definition Audio with DTS and Dolby Contact: Gigabyte Technology, Mumbai Tel: 26526696. E-mail: sales@gigabyte.in  RQS# E64 or SMS Buy 131164 to 6677

3DMark also has a CPU test, in which it scored an impressive 6876 marks. We

ran DOOM3 to check how well it performs with a good GPU and the board didn't

disappoint, scoring 111.8 FPS under standard conditions.

Encoding a 720 MB MPEG video to DivX took 8 min 41s whereas encoding a 700 MB

of WAV file to MP3 took 15 min 4s. Finally, we ran Cinebench 9.5 for testing the

board's image rendering and 4D shading capabilities. It impressed us with

scores of 409 points for single CPU rendering and 754 for multiple. In 4D

shading it scored 448 whereas Open GL software and hardware lighting scores were

1945 and 3670 respectively.

Bottom Line: A good buy for high-end users and gamers with excellent

on-board audio.

Anadi Misra