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- Date:
- Thursday , May 15, 2008
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
XFX 790i 3-Way SLI Motherboard Review
NVIDIA has released their highly anticipated DDR3 chipset, the 790i Ultra SLI and we take a look at this new piece of silicon from the green team in the form of the XFX 790i Ultra SLI.
NVIDIA nTune
Included with the XFX 790i Ultra SLI is the NVIDIA nTune Beta 6.00 utilities. These include new monitoring software and some slightly different options than nTune had in the past. Really this is nTune as it always has been with the inclusion of new monitoring software.
Additionally on the disk is a System Update utility that provides BIOS update and driver update functionality within the nTune. Normally the BIOS update utility is a separate download and installation. It is actually nice that XFX included it with the board.
The nTune software works with the existing NVIDIA control panel as you can see above. The nTune part of it is from the performance tab on down to video and television options. Once the performance tab is selected the user is prompted with a user license agreement. Once the agreement is accepted, additional options appear.
The first option listed under performance is the Device Settings tab. Here there are several categories of settings that appear in the window to the right of the NVIDIA Control Panel. There is a CPU tab, motherboard tab, memory and GPU tab. The CPU tab only has an FSB setting and a cooling setting which controls the throttle of the CPU fan. The motherboard tab has FSB settings, PCIe slot 1 & 2 clock settings. Fan control settings, voltage settings and a display that shows rules applying to that hardware. The memory tab provides settings to adjust CAS timings and view SPD values. Memory bus and frequency information is also displayed here. Finally there is a GPU tab if you are using an NVIDIA graphics card. The tab covers GPU Core Clock, Memory Clock, Shader Clock, cooling speed adjustments and a display showing existing core frequencies for the GPU selected.
There is a View System Information choice from the menu tree. It shows processor information, DIMM information, clock speeds, driver information, it also shows the installed graphics card, FSB frequencies, CPU multipliers, PCI-Express bus and GPU Clock information. NVIEW Profiles is the next option and it contains rules displayed in a form similar to Microsoft Outlook client rule settings. The Update your System Drivers section contains very basic settings for checking for driver updates. It is laid out in a fashion that is very similar to Windows XP’s automatic update tab. You can adjust the time and date to check for updates, never check for updates, check now and disable auto up date features settings.
The NVIDIA monitoring utility contains categories for motherboard, CPU, GPU, memory, LAN and disk usage. Simply click on the category you wish to monitor and you’ll see the graphic rotate around to the object being monitored. Below the object are voltages and temperatures along with other pertinent settings. At the very bottom of the utility is a slider to adjust opacity. This utility is a nice improvement over previous NVIDIA monitoring functionality built into older versions of the software.