In Figure 6, you can see the detail of the passive heatsinks used on this motherboard MOSFET transistors from the voltage regulator circuit and south bridge.

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Figure 6: Passive heatsinks used on the MOSFET transistors and south bridge.

This motherboard has two Gigabit Ethernet ports as you can see in Figure 7, both controlled by the south bridge using two Marvell 88E1116 chips to make the physical layer interface.

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Figure 7: Biostar TForce 590 SLI Deluxe.

The south bridge used by nForce 590 SLI brings one ATA-133 port and six SATA-300 ports, supporting NCQ, RAID0, RAID1, RAID0+1, RAID5 and JBOD. On this motherboard one of the SATA-300 ports is installed on the motherboard rear panel (see Figure 7).

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Figure 8: SATA-300 ports.

You can also see in Figure 8 that this motherboard has a POST display, which can tell you through a two-digit code what is wrong if your computer doesn’t turn on. You can also see that this motherboard has a reset and a power switch soldered on it.

In Figure 9 you can also see a VIA VT6307, which provides two FireWire (IEEE1394) ports. One of them is soldered directly on the motherboard (see Figure 7), while the other one is available through an I/O bracket that comes with the motherboard. This motherboard also provides ten USB 2.0 ports, six soldered on the motherboard and four available through the use of I/O brackets.

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Figure 9: Slots and VIA VT6307 chip.

As we mentioned before, this motherboard has two PCI Express x16 slots, supporting SLI x16, one PCI Express x4, one PCI Express x1 and two standard PCI slots.

On the audio section a Realtek ALC882 codec is used, which provides an impressive 103 dB output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), a 90 dB input signal-to-noise ratio, eight audio channels (7.1 format) and SPDIF output using up to 192 kHz sampling rate (the input is limited to 96 kHz). This motherboard provides coaxial and optical SPDIF outputs and inputs, however it comes only with one I/O bracket, so you have to choose if you want to connect it as an input or as an output. This codec also features two independent audio channels for audio streamming, available on the audio front panel header.

On the memory side, TForce 590 SLI Deluxe has four DDR2-DIMM sockets, supporting up 4 GB up to DDR2-800. On this motherboard sockets 1 and 2 are orange and sockets 3 and 4 are green. To use DDR2 dual channel mode just install each module on sockets with the same color.

This motherboard requires an eight-pin EPS12V power supply and also has an extra 12V power connector using a regular peripheral power plug. Biostar does not explain when this extra connector should be used. We recommend you using it.