nForce 590 SLI

The NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP chipset is the new flagship offering in the nForce 500 familiy. It consists of two chips with a 10 Gbit/s interconnect. This was already the case with the nForce 4 x16 chipset as the extra PCIe lanes needed to be added through a second chip. When NVIDIA announced availabilty of the new nForce 4 chipsets, most manufacturers used traditional fans to cool these new chips. It is interesting to see that a lot of manufacturers now offer heatpipe cooling for the nForce 590SLI right from the start. Cooling has become a problem for chipsets as well, as the space on mainboards has stayed the same, while more and more features are being packed onto the boards. Previous generation of mainboards were able to use large heatsinks with small fans to cool the core-logic. Today the location of the chip leaves the designers with two options: the use of a small, but fast turning fan or elaborate heatpipe cooling.



The chipset has a massive 46 PCIe lanes configured in 9 links with two PCIe x16, one x8 and six x1. It also has all the features of the nForce 570 SLI core-logic including all the new technologies. On top of that, there is one feature exclusive to this chipset - it is called the LinkBoost Technology.