Date:
Tuesday , March 18, 2008
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Editor:
Steve Lynch
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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.

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XFX nForce 790i Ultra Motherboard

This motherboard from XFX is based on the NVIDIA 790i Ultra reference design that was engineered by NVIDIA. It is for use with an Intel socket 775 processor and officially supports front side bus speeds of 1600MHz (4*400MHz) and DDR3 memory bus speeds of 1333MHz (2*666MHz). It also supports NVIDIA’s 3-Way SLI using a PCIe 2.0 bus system (32 full lanes) and NVIDIA’s Enthusiast System Architecture.

Setup & Experience

Processors

We have tested our XFX 790i Ultra with both dual core 45nm Wolfdale and quad core 45nm Yorkfield parts from Intel. Both our (slow-to-market) E8500 and (yet-to-be-released) QX9770 ran flawlessly on our 790i Ultra motherboard. While older nForce motherboards have issues with newer quad core Intel processors, this was not the case with the 790i Ultra. The QX9770 (8*400=3.2GHz) Core 2 Extreme was recognized and detected properly without issue as was the E8500 (9.5*333=3.16GHz) Core 2 Duo.

BIOS

While I am not going to go into great detail here on the BIOS, it is extremely feature rich as we have come to expect from nForce reference boards. (We will cover every BIOS option in our upcoming review.) There are enough voltage options to pretty much burn up whatever you want to. The CPU and memory busses are “fully” independent of each other allowing you to pretty much dial up whatever speed you wish for each. Little perks already found on other enthusiast motherboards for a while now have been added, like being able to use the Esc key to bring up a boot device menu on the fly as well as being able to access an embedded BIOS flasher. I could not however get the device to boot from my USB stick.

Memory

Our board was supplied directly from NVIDIA and with it came two 1GB sticks of Crucial Ballistix DDR3 memory. The part number on these sticks is BL12864BA2009.8SFB. These sticks are noted to be EPP2.0 compliant, have an operating frequency of 2000MHz at 9-9-9-28 at 1.9v and are not offered for sale yet to my knowledge. High end DDR3, while still expensive, is at least getting a bit less expensive. $297 after MIR.

Hard Drive Arrays & OS Install

We used a total of three hard drives during testing; two 150GB Western Digital Raptor drives configured in a RAID 0 array using the NVIDIA controller for OS, as well as a single 250GB Western Digital Caviar. Again we had no issues with our configuration and our Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit install went along without any problems whatsoever. Anyone installing Windows to an nForce RAID array knows this was not always the case, hence worth mentioning.

Cooling

Our cooling solution consisted of the aging Koolance system with its “300w” capable water block. And for those of you wondering, we use these more as a tool to control noise rather than supplying us with a cooling solution. It is arguable that some of the “giant” air coolers on the market today can give almost as good performance as the older Koolance. We do employ a single 120mm fan to move air across the board.

Cooling systems on most boards are designed to utilize airflow from a stock CPU cooler and this board is no different. On first inspection, the cooling system employed on the XFX 790i Ultra motherboard looks to be very robust, but the proof is in the pudding as you will see below.

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The board also comes with a small custom fan and housing to fit the cooling fins that extend from the northbridge. I would not suggest that anyone leave this off although it is entirely possible that you could depending on your case environment.

Setup & Install Summary

I set up, configure, and install operating systems on a lot of motherboards throughout the year. Every single motherboard that you see reviewed on HardOCP has been through my hands no matter who is noted as the author of the review. I still personally benchmark every motherboard. For every one you see, it seems as though there is one that you don’t. And you don’t because we could never get it to work right in the first place.

That said, my level of appreciation for being able to take a motherboard out of its box and get it up and running quickly and without problem is huge. This is one extremely important area that ASUS and Gigabyte have excelled in for a couple of years now. The XFX 790i Ultra was one of those motherboards that was a pleasure to set up. Everything with the motherboard worked exactly as it should. It is hard to explain just how big a deal motherboard ease of use is to us here at HardOCP, but anyone that has ever gone to install a motherboard and has been faced with hardware issues that kept them from successfully installing the OS will know what I am talking about. And if you don’t, hope you never do.