Although overshadowed by the same-day launch of AMD's latest Socket generation, the AM2, Nvidia's latest chipset, the nForce 5, is the company's most powerful to date. Both of them come together on Gigabyte's new GA-M59SLI-S5, which uses the most powerful nForce 5 chipset - the 590 SLI - and, as befits any flagship Gigabyte board, it comes loaded with features.

Unlike previous nForce chipsets, the new 590 SLI uses two chips; the C51Xe SPP (think of this as the Northbridge) and the MCP55PXE (Southbridge). It offers two full-speed, x16 PCI-E slots so you can run your SLI graphics setup at full speed. Incidentally, the GA-M59SLI-S5 has a third x8 PCI-E slot separating the two X16 slots, which could be used for the upcoming solutions from both ATI and Nvidia for processing game physics.

The first thing that strikes you about the board is the cooling solution Gigabyte has used to keep these two chipsets from overheating. Like a few other companies using the 590SLI, Gigabyte has gone down the heatpipe route on the GA-M59SLI-S5, with its Silent Pipe technology. This not only keeps the chipsets cool, but also the MOSFETS (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors, since you asked), next to the AM2 Socket.

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As the AM2 CPU utilises DDR2 memory, the four DIMM slots can support up to 16GB (if you are using 64-bit Windows that is) while for the rest of us using normal 32-bit Windows, the limit is 4GB of DDR2 800/667/533/500.

The rest of the board is tidily laid out, with two PCI slots sitting under the bottom-most x16 slot while two of the eight - yes eight - SATA 3GB/s ports sit under these. These two are controlled by a Gigabyte controller and can be configured into RAID 0, 1 or JBOD arrays.

The remaining six SATA ports are mounted towards the right-hand side of the board and are controlled by the MCP55PXE, which offers more flexibility when it comes to setting up arrays with the Nvidia RAID function; RAID 0, 1, 0+1, RAID 5 or JBOD arrays.

The integrated 7.1 audio has Dolby and DTS support to enhance your enjoyment of games, DVD movies, music, etc. Also integrated into the board is dual Gigabit LAN, supporting Teaming. Teaming allows the two LAN connections to work together for faster transferring of large data files; handy if you want to move big files around your home network.

If you like to tinker with BIOS settings (and who doesn't?), there are plenty of overclocking options, although still not as many as in the reference Nvidia design. You can tweak speeds and voltage settings for the CPU, memory, PCI-E and chipset.

Thankfully the GA-M59SLI-S5 has some added BIOS protection just in case you run into problems with that little lot. Virtual Dual BIOS and BIOS Setting Recovery technology can get you back up and running again if you happen to get a bit carried away with the BIOS settings.

Gigabyte's latest flagship board combines two of the latest CPU and chipset technologies to very good effect. A great board for people at the cutting edge of desktop computing.