NVIDIA nForce 780a SLI Round-Up @ Hot Hardware
“Early this year while NVIDIA outlined their plans to mix things up at the high-end of their AMD chipset line-up with the IGP-equipped nForce 780a SLI, but it has taken quite a bit of time to bring that product to market. Today though, we present to you three nForce 780a SLI-based motherboards (two from Asus and one from MSI), that are sure to pique the interest of all of the AMD fans out there.”
MSI P7N Diamond @ OC Club
“With the positive results I achieved with on the last 780i board I tested still fresh in my mind, I was looking forward to pushing the MSI P7N Diamond to the absolute limit. Unfortunately, the limit came rather quickly. I tried using the official BIOS and two of the available beta releases, and found that my overclocking efforts were severely hampered by an inability to lower the multiplier on my Q6600 processor.”
ASUS M3N-HT 780a SLi @ OC Club
“The ASUS M3N-HT has many upgradable options such as the ability to run triple SLi if you have the cards available, or Dual SLi if you do not want to spend that much on GPUs. The temperature test with the Mempipe was not the greatest drop in temperature, but when a user is overclocking, every degree is a help to get the maximum out of his system. The Express Gate feature is a noble idea with a wealth of uses, especially if you need to get online to get a driver when you cannot get Windows to operate.”
Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6 @ Guru3D
“The GA-X48-DQ6 mainboard include a Quad BIOS, no less than 8 SATA devices can be connected, you’ll have eight USB 2.0 connectors on the rear, as stated earlier on, two PCI-Express gen 2.0 ports. Also when you first glimpse at the mainboard you’ll notice some subtleties, the first is that Gigabyte is trying to tackle heat in an original manner, and they are doing a nice job with that.”
Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 @ Bjorn3D
“GIGABYTE makes two versions of this board utilizing Intel’s X48 chipset. The X48 which is a DDR2 variant and the X48T which is the DDR3 version that we will be covering today. The X48 brings minimal changes to the chipset when compared to the X38 and the only tangible difference should be more overclocking headroom.”
ASUS P5Q Deluxe @ Hot Hardware
“Asus showed off a few P45-based motherboards at the CeBit show a while back, but at the time, the boards weren’t quite ready for the market. We have, however, gotten our hands on final production version of the Asus P5Q Deluxe, which should be available soon. Head on over to the site and check it out…”
MSI X48C Platinum @ TBreak
“Upgrading your rig is never an easy task- especially when you have to replace the motherboard. Generally speaking, when you upgrade your motherboard, chances are that you’re also looking at a new CPU and sometimes RAM. With their X48 chipset based motherboard, MSI tries to make things a little easy by providing DDR2 as well as DDR3 support which can certainly reduce the size of dent to you account.”
Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 @ Hot Hardware
“Wolfdale is Intel’s first 45nm based dual-core design, and is an interesting product beyond first glance. When it was first announced, there was a bit of doubt throughout the industry of the chip’s viability in the market. The doubt was that it would be foolish of Intel put major weight behind a dual-core processor architecture, as the future is clearly quad-core processors and beyond.”
ASUS M3N-HT Deluxe @ PC Per
“The drawbacks to the Hybrid Power though outweigh the positives in this current implementation. First, only the 9800 GTX and the 9800 GX2 graphics cards are supported with the 780a SLI chipset – that leaves a whole host of NVIDIA users with 9600 GTs, 8800 GTS and GT cards that probably think they have the right to Hybrid Power technology since their cores are based on the same that rests under the hoods of the 9800 GTX and GX2.”
AMD Phenom X3 @ MadShrimps
“The AMD Phenom X2 was announced quite some time ago but still hasn’t seen the light of day; instead we were greeted by the X3 Phenom, a new breed of processor, first in the market to offer a Triplecore solution. This CPU is priced lower than AMD’s own X4 and Intel Core 2 Duo series.”