The C51XEM2AA was the first nForce 590 SLI motherboard that we reviewed, and we were immediately impressed by its great performance, features and overclockability. Since then, however, every major motherboard manufacturer has released an nForce 590 SLI motherboard.
As the C51XEM2AA is based on Nvidia's flagship nForce 590 SLI chipset, it has two 16x PCI-E slots and supports SLI. The two 16 PCI-E slots are spaced well apart from each other, with the single 4x and 1x PCI-E slots placed in between them. On the outer edge of the PCB are two PCI slots.
The C51XEM2AA supports Intel HD Audio and has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, plus ten USB 2 ports and two FireWire ports. The six RAID-capable S-ATA II ports provided by the Nvidia Southbridge should be enough for most people. The component layout, although generally good, has a couple of minor troublespots, such as the capacitor that gets bent out of position every time you plug a wide graphics card into the primary 16x PCI-E slot.
The C51XEM2AA proved to be curiously slow for an nForce 590 SLI motherboard, and lagged behind its compatriots in our Media Benchmarks. The BIOS provides a lot more voltage options than most motherboards, such as a maximum vcore of 1.85V and a RAM voltage of 2.5V, although it can only supply up to 1.4V to the Northbridge. Even so, we overclocked the FSB of our test Athlon 64 X2 CPU from 200MHz to 260MHz, the same frequency as that of most of the nForce 590 SLI motherboards. Unfortunately, even when we dropped the CPU multiplier from 11 to 5, the C51XEM2AA couldn't manage an FSB any higher than 260MHz.
With so many nForce 590 SLI motherboards now on the market, it's worth checking out every model to find out which best meets your requirements. Ultimately, while the C51XEM2AA is a good motherboard, it's been surpassed by faster and more overclockable models.
Author: James Gorbold
Custom PC Online