In order to test the Asus M2N32 WS Pro, we used the following setup:

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ AM2
• Memory: Mushkin 2x512MB PC2-6400 (DDR2 800)
• PSU: OCZ GameXStream GXS600 SLI-Ready
• HDD: WD 800JB

Sadly, we didn't have any other AM2 socket based motherboards in order to compare benchmarks, so we ran a few rounds of Sisoft Sandra 2007 SP1, Everest Ultimate Edition 2006, and SuperPI with other chipsets and CPU combinations for comparison :

So, let's see how our nVidia nForce 590 platform performs compared with the other chipsets. Apparently, in the memory bandwidth tests, our chipset/memory combination index mark was quite a bit slower than the nForce 570. Then again, its performance was better than Intel's 975X:

Moving on to the memory latency benchmarks, we can see that only the Intel Core 2 Duo is faster:

Lastly, in the Cache and memory benchmark, performance was mixed. The combined index is average but the Speed Factor is very low. The Intel Core 2 E6700 offers almost double the performance of the other processors in our comparison:

We'll now take a look at several memory comparison tests for three motherboards with different chipsets and configurations. They include the Intel 945P (Abit IL8), Intel 975X (Foxconn 975XX) and of course our nVidia nForce 590SLI (Asus M2N32 WS Pro). In all cases, the same memory modules were used. Higher is better except for Memory Latency.

As we can see, the nVidia 590 SLI based board provides a significant boost in memory performance. The CPU scores are also much better, and highlights the superiority of the AMD Athlon X2 4600+ over Intel's D930 :

Running the SuperPI and PC Mark 05 benchmarks, the Asus M2N32 WS Pro again prove to be a faster:

- Overclocking

Asus offers its AiBooster software, that can overclock your system on-the-fly, either using pre-defined setups or manually. We decided to do it the hard way, meaning, manually.

After several attempts with the voltages at default settings, we were able to boot at 2.688 GHz, and FSB at 224MHz:

Memory pumped up to 447.6 MHz, giving a DDR2-895 speed!

Compared with the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors, even with our maximum overclocking settings, the performance was still lower, as was expected:

Comparing several test results from Lavasys Everest Ultimate Edition 2006 against those with stock speeds, we find a significant increase in performance for both memory and CPU: