Information on NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI

[Bindusar]

I need some information on NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI mobo. It was in the news, that it has a better management for native PCI Express 2.0 as well as integrating a DDR3 memory controller a first for NVIDIA. The more I know about it is that the SPP, which is the official name of NVIDIA northbridge, that manages both the PCI-Express 2.0 natively.

[Hardwareman]

To recall, on nForce 780i SLI PCI-E 2.0 was maintained by an additional chip, the nForce 200, which was connected via a PCI-E 1.0 "overclocked" to PPS: in practice, the performance was not at those offered by the PCI-E X38. This time the management of the PCI-E 2.0 is native, this new version allows for recall on each link to achieve a data rate of 500 Mb / s, against 250 MB / s for the first version. Two PCI Express 2.0 x16 are well managed.

[Maxforu]

NVIDIA also highlighted improvements in the management of the PCI-Express on the SPP useful in a multi GPU setup: the GPU-to-GPU Direct Link, first, that allows cards to communicate with each other directly without going through the memory controller and the Broadcast, which allows the CPU to send information only once which is then replicated to all GPUs. It remains to be seen whether these improvements will have a significant impact in the Quad SLI for example, or the SLI 9800 GTX.

[Killen]

The PCI-E 2.0 is not the only innovation offered by the nForce 790i since it is the first non-Intel chipset DDR3 manager. The internal organization of memory cells has been modified to obtain a rate doubled without increasing their frequency depends on the buffer I / O and external memory bus. Besides the gain of consumption, this memory thus provides a gain bandwidth sensitive side as it is officially available in versions ranging from DDR3-800 and DDR3-1600, double that of DDR2 is DDR2-400 to DDR2-800, and that manufacturers are now up to DDR3-2133. You can visit the official site and read for more configuration details.

[T.J.]

NVIDIA launches two versions of the nForce 790i, SLI and Ultra SLI. If the first is officially "limited" to DDR3-1333, the second goes further and NVIDIA announces support for DDR3-2000, but cannot o / c the FSB because of the flexibility offered by the NVIDIA chipsets that enable adjust the memory and FSB asynchronously (without a limited number of coefficient FSB: DRAM). The Ultra version is also advertised as being more overclockable, although precise figures are provided.

[Rawko]

The southbridge is still the same and therefore offers two Gigabit Ethernet ports, it is possible to couple via DualNet technology, and 6 SATA ports configurable as RAID 0,1, 0 +1 or 5. It also manages her latest PCI Express x16, which is then type 1.0. The nForce 790i SLI reference, which will among other things sold by EVGA. Compared to the nForce 780i SLI, we note the addition of a smart management adding two additional SATA, the first being located near the first PCI-E, the second being an eSATA port. The cooling was revised still based heat pipe, it goes around the socket and cools the chipset but also the power supplies CPU and DRAM.

[deoWo]

The fan, optional, is the same as the 780i and is very noisy. In addition to the features handled by the chipset found a FireWire chip. Based on the nForce 790i Ultra SLI, that is to say, the version most overclockable chipset, it has a cooling-type fusion, that is to say, operating both in passive cooling that 'in watercooling. Only in this kind of situation that the additional bandwidth of PCI-E 2 is expected to make a difference, and that's what we tested on a GeForce 8800 GT 256MB.