14 DAY TRIAL // Although almost five years have passed since Nvidia introduced its nForce 500-series chipset, destined to power AMD socket AM2 and Intel LGA 775 motherboards, Gigabyte has recently announced the introduction of a new solutions based on this design which is compatible with AMD's latest AM3 processors.
This includes the Phenom II and Athlon II series of processors, the GA-M52LT-D3P also allowing users to install high-performance six-core CPUs based on the Thuban core.
However, in spite of its support for even the most advanced of AMD's chips, the specifications list is rather old school, the motherboard featuring no less than four PCI slots, a floppy connector as well as parallel and serial ports.
In addition, the number of SATA storage devices is limited to just two, users who want to install more drives having to rely on the IDE connector which supports ATA-133/100/66/33 and a maximum of 2 IDE devices.
Other features include four DDR3 DIMM slots, which support up to 16GB of 1666MHz memory, a 4+1 phase VRM, a high definition audio codec, Japanese solid capacitors and Dual-BIOS technology.
The expandability options of the board are further enhanced by the presence of two PCI Express x1 slots.
Moving to the back of the GA-M52LT-D3P, the rear I/O panel houses a limited number of connectors, including two PS/2 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, various audio jacks and S/PDIF In/Out, and an Ethernet port driven by a Realtek 8201EL 10/100 Mbit integrated NIC.
Back in 2006 when Nvidia released the nForce 520 LE chipset, this was used in various value-oriented motherboards as it lacked SLI support and carried only 20 PCI Express lanes.
The chipset does, however, feature RAID 0+1 and RAID 5, although the latter hasn't been implemented in Gigabyte's solution.
No details regarding the motherboard's availability and price have been disclosed until now.