GA-M57SLI-S4 is the first nForce 570 SLI chipset mainboard from Gigabyte. This mainboard supports the new AM2 socket 940 processor with DDR2-800 support. The mainboard supports 4 DDR2 DIMM slots, 6 SATA II ports NV RAID ports supporting NV 0, 1, 0+1, 5, JBOD. 10 USB ports 10 ports (6 by cable). It also supports 2 x 8 PCIe lanes sfor SLI operation. Other features include 1394 and GbE(Marvell 1116PHY) and 8 ch HD audio (ALC883 8 Ch HD audio). This mainboard uses a silent cooler, so no more noisy fans. The board is also Windows Vista ready and AMD Live! Ready. While most mainboards will throw in a Sil3132 for another additional 2 SATAII ports and another Marvell PHY for a 2nd GbE, Gigabyte chose not to do that to make the board more affordable for the mainstream users. External Sata ports can be installed with the brackets provided.

Performance wise, the board does well in all categories alongside the other manufacturers' boards based on 590 SLI, 570 SLI, ULI 1697 and NV 6100 chipset. In certain cases, we find that 590 SLI might really be an white elephant since as you would be paying more with not much of a performance gain.

The overclocking options are plenty for you to tweak with. Although the CPU freq is limited to 300, I was informed that a newer bios will open it up beyond 300HTT. With our super X2 4000+ CPU, we managed to get it POST right at 300 x 10 with our ram running at DDR2-600 at c5, vcore +0.15v of default. The best spot is around 295x10 and we went into Windows.

Installation is easy for this board. I like its design other than the heatsink which is hot to touch. I think a fan should be mounted to cool down the chipset.

Overall, the board excels in performance and it comes with the necessary options that most would need. As I have mentioned before, the 570 SLI chipset is a pretty good chipset that is cheaper and performance comparable to the 590 SLI. The only regret would be the single GbE on this board. Other than that, this board is perfect.

Related Reviews 1
Related Reviews 2

Discuss in Forum