Verdict: The only SLI-compatible Core 2 motherboard, but it's incredibly slow

We saw a reference nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition motherboard a few months ago, but the chipset seems to be stuck in limbo at present. Only one manufacturer managed to get us an SLI-compatible Core 2 motherboard in time for this month's Labs test, and this is based on the lower-spec nForce 570 SLI Intel Edition chipset.

Like its namesake on the Socket AM2 platform, the nForce 570 SLI Intel Edition appears to have two 16x PCI-E slots. However, if you install two graphics cards in SLI then each slot is only allotted eight PCI-E lanes.

The budget nature of the chipset is also echoed in the choice of additional features and components on the board; there's a mere four S-ATA II ports, along with basic AC97 6-channel audio. Asus hasn't fitted any form of cooling to the Southbridge, so the chip lies bare to the elements, although the Northbridge and VRMs are covered by heatsinks. That said, there isn't much room to fit a heatsink to the Southbridge, as it's very close to the second high-speed PCI-E slot.

Traditionally, Intel has made the best-performing chipsets for its own CPUs, and the P5NSLI certainly does nothing to counter this trend. In practically every test we ran with the P5NSLI, the board proved to be significantly slower than the Intel P965 and 975X motherboards, sometimes by as much as 6 per cent. The P5NSLI also incorrectly read the latency timings of our Corsair test RAM as 4 - 4 - 4 - 31, instead of 5 - 5 - 5 - 15, which resulted in a further 7 per cent drop in performance.

The BIOS is basic, simply allowing you to increase the vcore to 1.6V, the Northbridge to 1.5V, the RAM to 2.1V and the FSB to 400MHz. We could only raise the FSB of our Core 2 Duo test CPU from 266MHz to 300MHz before the board failed to POST.

If the P5NSLI is anything to go by then it's no wonder that other motherboard manufacturers decided not to send us an nForce 570 SLI Intel Edition motherboard to test. The P5NSLI may be the only Core 2 motherboard that supports SLI, but it's slow and a poor overclocker.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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• DFI Lanparty JR P45-T2RS - Motherboards
• BFG GeForce GTX 260 OCX MaxCore - Graphics cards