The nVidia socket AM2 supporting chipsets include the nForce 590 SLI for enthusiast class users, the nForce 570 SLI for high end gamers, nForce 570 Ultra for mainstream gamers and the nForce 550 for the rest of the mainstream market. The nForce 570 SLI offers the best of both high-end and lower cost worlds, and it's the chipset the MSI K9N SLI Platinum is built upon.

Make no mistake, nVIDIA didn't simply re-brand its highly successful nForce4 chipset line, each offering in the nForce 500-series adds many completely new features into the mix. Take a quick look at the chart below to see how all four nForce 500-series chipsets stack up to one another; much of the differences reside with the number of PCI Express lanes available to each chipset.

nVidia nForce 500 Series Chipset Feature Breakdown nVidia nForce 590 SLI nVidia nForce 570 SLI nVidia nForce 570 Ultra nVidia nForce 550 CPU 940-pin Socket AM2 940-pin Socket AM2 940-pin Socket AM2 940-pin Socket AM2 nVida SLI Support Yes, (2 x16) Yes (1 x16, 2 x8) - - nVidia LinkBoost Yes - - - nVidia FirstPacket Yes Yes Yes Yes nVidia DualNet Yes Yes Yes - Native Gigabit Ethernet 2 2 2 1 Teaming Yes Yes Yes - TCP/IP Acceleration Yes Yes Yes - nVidia MediaShield Storage Yes Yes Yes Yes SATA/IDE HDD 6/2 6/2 6/2 4/2 SATA Speed 3Gb/s 3Gb/s 3Gb/s 3Gb/s RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 0, 1, 0+1, 5 0, 1, 0+1, 5 0, 1, 0+1 nVidia nTune Utility Yes Yes Yes Yes PCI Express Lanes 46 lanes 28 lanes 20 lanes 20 lanes USB Ports 10 10 10 10 PCI Slots 5 5 5 5 Audio High Definition Audio (Azalia) High Definition Audio (Azalia) High Definition Audio (Azalia) High Definition Audio (Azalia)

The nVidia nForce 570 SLI and 570 Ultra chipsets share a similar feature set to the nForce 550 MCP, all of which are more mainstream solutions with good cost/value ratio's. Both are single chip solutions with 16 PCI Express lanes devoted to the videocard sub system, however the nForce 570 Ultra only supports one videocard while the nForce 570 SLI supports two. The PCI Express x16 bus is split into two when SLI is configured so each videocard gets eight PCI Express lanes. There are an additional four PCI Express x1 slots and five PCI slots for expansion purposes.

Both chipsets have dual Gigabit Ethernet which includes nVidia's DualNet technology as well as its FirstPacket technology that allows packet prioritizing. There is one IDE channel, six SATAII connections (RAID modes 0, 1, 0+1 and 5 inclusive), and 10 USB 2.0 devices and Intel's 7.1 channel Azalia high definition audio options as will all other nForce 500-series chipsets.

Now that we've had a chance to touch upon some of the features of the MSI K9N SLI Platinum let's walk through the photo gallery of this board before jumping into the overclocking, the remarkably overclocking friendly BIOS and PCSTATS set of office oriented and gaming benchmarks.