Thinking of turning to the AM2 for faster speeds and going SLI too. Now my question is what is the best chipset to aim for on a am2 board? for gaming purposes.

Lost Art of the internet.

IMO, SLi is a waste of money, but it's your money to waste. Since you're probably willing to spend $500+ for 2 video cards, you should have no problem coming up with $150-200 for an nForce590 SLi board.

I know the story with the NVIDIA's nForce 590 SLI chipset on Intel's side of the field was that of a complete fumbling, as a host of issues that plagued the chipset on that platform kept it at considerable arm's length from virtually all motherboard manufacturers, but it seemed to have fared better on AMD's side.

Partly based on the above, I would perhaps suggest a 680i SLI based motherboard, obviously this means no AMD CPU, but at this time Intel has the performance edge anyway when looking to acquire a high performing "sweet spot" CPU.

However, I agree with jam that there is very little logic spending money an overpriced SLI motherboard that you'll most likely not put to that use. And if I was you, I'd just get a decently priced P965 motherboard & an entry level C2D like the E6300 or maybe even an E6600 if you feel like committing more on a CPU, your money is better spent that way.

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

You could always upgrade to a better X2 processor or an FX 60 to tie you over for another year or 2. if you aren't able to overclock your motherboard.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz
2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200
Nvidia 7900GT
SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0+1
Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

It's all about what you're willing to spend. I went with an SLi setup because I wanted to be able to get the most out of the games I play. Here's the setup I have now:

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Dual Core

Mobo: Asus M2N32 SLI Deluxe Wireless Edition - nVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP Chipset

Ram: 2GB Corsair DDR2

GPU: 2 x Evga 7950 GT KO - 512MB each for total of 1GB in SLI mode

PowerSupply: 750Watt

If you're going SLi you need to know a couple things.
1. It's not going to be cheap
2. Make sure you get the most recent drivers for your vid cards(should do this anyway lol)
3. You will not be able to run dual monitors in SLi mode if you have/use dual monitors

As far as the processor goes, there's better CPUs out there right now that will give you more bang for the buck. I have mine overclocked and when I got it, it was on par with most. But there are a slew of C2D CPUs that will blow mine out of the water and are around the same price if not cheaper.

My suggestion would be, get a Core 2 Duo and get a mobo that has a 680 chipset on it. You can still do SLi if you want w/the core 2 duo without a problem.

I forgot to mention. Check this site out http://forums.slizone.com/

Any question on SLi you have, it's been posted there at least 100 times.

I gotta agree with Sabertooth and Vertabreakers's suggestion to go Core 2 Duo instead.
Those C2Ds are truly badass gaming processors and pretty well-priced too.
If you do go SLi, a C2D would handle two video cards better than an Athlon X2, especially if they're a duo of 8800s.

Pentium III--Descendant of Intel Core.
Pentium III-S 1400 @ 1.63GHz, 512K L2
X800XT AIW OC 580/600
2GB of RAM
250GB HD
SB Audigy 2
QDI Advance 12 mobo
Smugly running Vista