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 790i Ultra Stability

One thing is for sure, a motherboard that is not stable or eats you hard drives is not one you want. Given that many early adopters of the nForce 680i took it in the ass on these two fronts, we thought that nForce 790i Ultra stability was the exact place to start our probing. In fact, one of the reasons this article is not in our typical “review” format is because a good majority of the time we had with 790i Ultra was spent specifically on stability testing.

She Does NOT Go Down

While that is something that none of us like to hear, it is true. Using the QX9770 and Crucial Ballistix at “stock” settings, I never once experienced an error or anything close to a BSOD while using the XFX 790i Ultra motherboard.

Torture & Grind

One thing I like to do is use our own in-house motherboard torture test. This consists of fully loading the CPU, memory, IO, and graphics busses on the motherboard and letting it run till it errors out, locks up, or BSODs. Overall, if a motherboard makes it through 12 hours or so of our torture test, we usually call that a “pass.” Sometimes we may cut the testing at 48 hours, but in the case of the 790i Ultra, I really wanted to see what we could get out of it. Below is a screen shot of the final testing that was completed successfully without a single application crash or error.

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Yes, you are reading that correctly. 110 hours of loaded stability. QX9770 fully loaded across all four cores, paging into 1.7GB of DDR3 1333MHz RAM, with Real-Time HDR IBL running as well. With RTHDRIBL and Orthos set to the “Blend” test you quickly run into a situation where the system runs out of memory and begins to thrash the hard drives heavily.

Moving Data

Does that not impress you? I did not just leave the system to run for 4 days while I played TF2. I actually used it while the torture test was running. Which I think is a feat in itself. It is not uncommon for a system to buckle while even taking a screenshot after this torture scenario has been running for a couple of days. Given the 680i history of data corruption I started doing sets of file transfers after it successfully reached the 48 hour mark. Not trivial tests either. I moved around blocks of 20GB+. Not just one at a time either. At some points I had as many as 6 file transfers running representing over 200GB of data being moved from my RAID 0 array that the OS resides on to my additional single hard drive and back as well. The XFX 790i Ultra did not falter.

Let’s Cook It

At the 95 hour mark of perfect stability under load, I decided to throw something else at the XFX 790i Ultra. Keep in mind that our testing usually takes place on an open test setup as seen on the previous page. We know this does not represent what many peoples’ systems see in the real world. So, we have learned to simulate a hot computer case. While we always get comments on this as being “ghetto,” it works incredibly well. (And no, Paul uses a real incubator on our PSU reviews to maintain temperature.)

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What you see above is a card board box fitted over our XFX 790i Ultra test system. The yellow wire protruding from the top is a thermistor connected to a Sperry digital thermometer. Cutting off airflow to the surface of the motherboard allowed us to bring the temperature up to a 50c, where it remained close to static. As you can see, we did not cover the 8800 GTX video card nor did we introduce any kind of airflow on the motherboard besides the stock chipset cooling fan. A 2cm gap at the back bottom edge of the box was the only opening.

I ran the 50c ambient torture test for a continued 15 hours without fail.

Stability Test Summary

The XFX 790i Ultra was pushed to limits I have simply not pushed any other motherboard to in the past. If you identify computer hardware with possibly being “bulletproof,” the XFX 790i Ultra is Kevlar®. I could not break it with any reasonable means that would represent anything close to a “real world” stress situation.