Since the release of the AM2 socket, NVIDIA has been enjoying the largest share of the motherboard chipset market. The nForce 5 series chipsets dominate not only at the high end but also at the value motherboard production lines. Today we will take a look at a motherboard made by the company which created the reference nForce 590i motherboards, Foxconn. Foxconn entered the retail market only recently, but they are old in the industrial and OEM business. They must have felt confident about their work on the reference nForce 590i motherboard, because they released it nearly unchanged to the retail market. If most reference motherboards of other companies ever made it to the retail market, it would be nothing more than trouble, but we feel confident about NVIDIA’s and Foxconn’s combined effort. The name of the motherboard is C51XEM2AA, which is certainly not the easiest model number to memorise.

Manufacturer specifications

Processor:	AMD Sempron™, Athlon™ 64, Athlon™ 64x2, Athlon™ 64FX processors, Socket AM2
Chipset:	NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI
Front Side Bus:	2000 MT/s HyperTransport™
Memory:	Dual channel DDR2 800 / 667 / 533 x 4 DIMMs, Max 8GB
VGA on Die:	N/A
Expansion Slots:	2 x PCIe x16, 1 x PCIe x4, 1 x PCIe x1, 2 x PCI
IDE:	ATA133 x 1
Serial ATA(SATA)/RAID:	Serial ATA II x 6 with RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, JBOD
Audio:	7.1+2 channel, Realtek ALC882D (HDA)
LAN:	Marvell 88E1121 Dual 10/100/1000 Base T Ethernet PHY
IEEE1394:	1394a x 2 (TSB82AA2B), 1394b x 1 (TSB81BA3)
Back Panel I/O Ports:	1 x PS/2 keyboard 1 x PS/2 mouse 1 x 1394a 1 x 1394b 6 x USB 2.0 2 x RJ45 1 set 7.1 channel Audio jacks (5 jacks + 1 S/PDIF output)
Internal I/O Connectors:	2 x USB 2.0 headers, support 4 ports 1 x Front audio header 1 x COM 1 x Speaker 1 x Front panel 1 x Buzzer 1 x 1394a
BIOS Features:	LPC-4Mb, ACPI 2.0b, APM 1.2, PnP 1.0a, SMBIOS 2.3, USB 2.0, WfM 2.0
Support CD:	NVIDIA nForce Driver, DirectX, Audio Driver, Adobe Reader, Norton Internet Security, Manual & Raid Manual, NVIDIA nTune, Foxconn LiveUpdate
Standards/Manageability:	USB 2.0, WfM 2.0, DMI 2.0, WOL by PME, LPC 1.1 Interface
Special Features:	NVIDIA®LinkBoost™ technology, SLI™-Ready, MediaShield storage™ technology, HDA, NVIDIA nTune, NCQ, AMD® Cool “n” Quiet™ technology, Fox LiveUpdate, QuadSLi support
Form Factor:	ATX (12" x 9.6")

Packaging and bundle

The packaging of the C51XEM2AA is simple and well designed. Despite its minimalistic design, it looks better than many other packages that exercise a lot of colors and fancy artwork. Everything inside the package is well placed, supported and separated, it would be hard to improve on this.

The C51XEM2AA is a top grade motherboard, so we expected the bundle to be up to spec as well. Thankfully the bundle is rich and all the necessary cabling is supplied right out of the box.

All of the cables that Foxconn placed in the package, even those used on the PCI brackets are black, to match the color of the motherboard. Foxconn also include high quality round black IDE and Floppy cables, which are a welcome addition since most of the companies still include ribbon cables or bad quality cables that kink easily. There are three PCI brackets, one with four extra USB ports, one with a RS232 serial port and finally one bracket with two Firewire ports. That said, there is only one Firewire header on the motherboard so the end user can choose and use only one of the two Firewire plugs. The manual and the quick start guide Foxconn included are quite thorough, but certain parts such as the BIOS settings explanations could be improved.