Date:
Tuesday , March 18, 2008
Category:
Motherboards / Chipsets
Manufacturers:
XFX
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Editor:
Steve Lynch

XFX nForce 790i Ultra Motherboard Preview

NVIDIA has a new nForce motherboard chipset for Intel’s newest CPUs that brings with it support for DDR3 and SLI. Some of you are excited, while I can already hear groans of agony from others. Let's give you the straight dope on 790i Ultra.

History

NVIDIA is no stranger to motherboard chipsets. The company has been engineering these chipsets for quite a while. And it is arguable as to just how truly successful it has been for them. This summer will mark its 7th year of being knee deep into motherboard chipsets, and certainly a lot has changed since 2001.

One thing is for sure, and that is that NVIDIA’s nForce finally seemed poised for greatness with the 680i launch in late 2006. We were wooed with shiny new hardware that impressed the hell out of us with great overclocking and beautiful benchmarks and out came the Gold Awards. And then something really ugly happened. About a month later a bunch of folks started losing tons of data and were welcomed to a BSOD hell on their pricey new systems. And, though the data corruption problem was soon "fixed", it undoubtedly left the 680i with a big black eye. It was a huge fall backwards and dissolved a good bit of trust that had been felt by enthusiasts towards the nForce 680i motherboard. Beyond that, 680i has been a mixed bag. It has worked perfectly for many folks and for a lot of others it has not. Our own motherboard reviewer, Daniel Dobrowolski, has had three 680i motherboards fail. A quick search of the HardForum’s Motherboard section for "680i" will net you all sorts of results. Many enthusiasts have had great experiences with nForce 680i motherboards, and many have not.

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The nForce 780i has been launched since the 680i, but it honestly has not seemed to be much different than the 680i beyond the fact that it seems to be a much better product overall in terms of motherboard build quality. No widespread reported failures with the 780i, but all the samples that we have had in hand were a bit “quirky” in terms of benchmarks and 400MHz bus processor support when compared directly to Intel’s X48 chipset that should just now finally be getting to market, which looks to be a great product. To be succinct, I have not found an nForce 780i motherboard that I would install in my own system.

So, this all brings us back to today’s nForce 790i Ultra launch...

Our Focus

We are not going to ply you with the usual “motherboard review” today that we would normally do on a launch day. Instead, I wanted to discuss some key issues that we think our readers will have on their minds when it comes to thinking about purchasing an nForce 790i Ultra motherboard. A full review with pages and pages of benchmarks will follow in the coming weeks, but to be honest, we are just a tad bit trigger shy of extolling any 790i Ultra virtues based on the experiences we have had out of one sample motherboard running a BETA BIOS.

With that said, let’s get into what we think our readers need to know about NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra. We hope to have answered some very pointed questions about stability, speed, features, and overclocking. These are the things that would be the most important to me should I consider installing the nForce 790i Ultra in my system.