1.3Special features

1.3.1Product highlights

Latest processor technology

The motherboard comes with a 940-pin AM2 socket that supports AMD Athlon™ 64 X2/AMD Athlon™ 64/AMD Athlon™ 64 FX/AMD Sempron™ processors. With an integrated low-latency high-bandwidth memory controller and a highly scalable HyperTransport™ technology-based system bus, the motherboard provides a powerful platform for your diverse computing needs, increased office productivity, and enhanced digital media experience. See page 2-6 for details.

NVIDIA® Scalable Link Interface (SLI™)

The NVIDIA® Scalable Link Interface (SLI™) technology allows two graphics processing units (GPUs) in a single system. This technology takes advantage of the PCI Express™ bus architecture and features intelligent hardware and software solutions that allows multiple GPUs to work together and achieve exceptional graphics performance.

DDR2 memory support

The motherboard supports DDR2 memory that features data transfer rates of 800/667/533 MHz to meet the higher bandwidth requirements of the latest

3D graphics, multimedia, and Internet applications. The dual-channel DDR2 architecture doubles the bandwidth of your system memory to boost system performance, eliminating bottlenecks with peak bandwidths of up to 12.8 GB/s. See pages 2­11 to 2-13 for details.

PCI Express™ interface

The motherboard fully supports PCI Express, the latest I/O interconnect technology that speeds up the PCI bus. PCI Express features point‑to­point serial interconnections between devices and allows higher clockspeeds by carrying data in packets. This high speed interface is software compatible with existing PCI specifications. See page 2-18 for details.

Dual RAID solution

Onboard RAID controllers provide the motherboard with dual-RAID functionality that allows you to select the best RAID solution using IDE or Serial ATA devices.

The NVIDIA® nForce® 570 SLI™ chipset allows RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, RAID 5, and JBOD configuration for six SATA 3.0 Gb/s connectors. See pages 2-25.

The JMicron JMB363 controller supports two additional Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s connectors (one at mid-board and one on the rear panel) and allows RAID 0, RAID 1, and JBOD configurations on these ports. See pages 2-26 for details.

1-

Chapter 1: Product introduction