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With the recent unveiling of AMD's Socket AM2 platform, we are starting to see a barrage of new motherboards popping up all over the place. NVIDIA was the first to join the AM2 fray with their nForce 5XX series chipsets, and we're seeing the results of that early start with the presence of the third nForce 590 SLI motherboard in our lab today.

Enter ASUS' M2N32-SLI Deluxe edition.

AMD's Socket AM2 review kits originally shipped with a pre-production sample of the M2N32-SLI, sporting a revision number of 1.02G. With the exception of a few cables and other odds and ends, the pre-production M2N32 shipped with nary an accessory. As such, we opted to get ahold of a retail, final sample of the board before committing to a review -- and here we are today, armed with a revision 1.03G board.

While the boards themselves look physically identical (short of a change of  heatsink color), we got the impression that this newer revision is more reliable when it comes to overclocking. Bill is the resident overclocking aficionado, and he reports that the new revision can be taken much further as far as the memory bus is concerned. The first revision of the M2N32-SLI, along with the BIOS that it shipped to us with, was not very overclocking-friendly. It overclocked rather poorly, and did not exhibit the rock-solid fail-over that we are used to from ASUS boards.

On the other hand, the Foxconn C51XEM2AA overclocked much better out-of-the-box, and we were about to lose hope in the M2N32-SLI as a result of that. Shortly after receiving the 1.02G M2N32-SLI, ASUS sent us an updated BIOS that literally opened a cornucopia of overclocking capability. The new board revision follows through with this even further, to the extent that Bill is now jokingly calling the 1.03G M2N32-SLI the "God board".

We've probably made you salivate enough, so without further ado, let's tear things open!