News - First Look:Nvidia's nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset

Misc Links

First Look:Nvidia's nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset
Posted by newsbot on March 19th 2008

Nvidia is pushing hard on the platform front with itstechnologyportfolio – ESA, EPP 2.0 and SLI are all core Nvidia productsassociated with the nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard and this launch.While some are open standards, so no royalties are claimed when usingthem, it doesn't mean all is well for the ultra-high-end user.To say the cost of upgrading to use the nForce 790i (Ultra) SLI issignificant is certainly an understatement:on top of one of the mostexpensive motherboards ever sold, you'll need super expensiveperformance DDR3 memory (with EPP 2.0) to make the most of it. Thenthere's the fact that running at over 1,600MHz limits the board to justtwo DIMM slots, so running 4GB in 2x2GB has just gone from sellingorgans to selling your children as well. There is a value add with all manners of SLI support, but you can getthat with plenty of other nForce 7-series boards, although in this casethe north bridge is tweaked to use SLI better. ESA is entirely optionalif you want to invest in it or not and again provides an upgradefeature choice – that said, we expect this more to be jumped upon bycompanies that build complete systems, rather than end users.It was designed to be too expensive and a niche product, so don't getyour knickers in a twist. While you may care about that because youwant the latest and greatest, Nvidia doesn't. And you can bet yourcotton socks that the top Futuremark slots will all consist of nForce790i SLI boards going forwards – that’s prime marketing material aboveall else. Be wary of what's coming out in the next few months too:there's notelling what else Nvidia will launch in the summer on the Intel front,because it has promised a chipset that sports Hybrid SLI support, andwould you want to spend all that money on a new board and not haveaccess to these new technologies? Well, maybe not in actual fact,because those running a 30

View article at bit-tech.net

(Due to past abuse from spammers you must be a registered forum member to post comments, and must be logged in)