Posted on Friday, November 02 2007 @ 0:40 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
TweakTown
found a photo of a NVIDIA nForce 790i based motherboard. This is a new chipset for the Intel platform with PCI Express 2.0 and DDR3 memory support. One of the weird things is that not all three x16 slots will be PCI Express 2.0, one of them will be PCI Express 1.0 because of chipset limitations.
This could well be because Nvidia continues to use the same MCP as the 680i/780i chipset and this would be why there’s still PCI Express 1.0/1.1 slots on the board. This would make sense out of a cost saving perspective since there’s no real need for a new MCP at the moment.
The board has four memory slots for DDR3 memory, three x16 PCI Express slots as mentioned, two PCI slots and two x1 PCI Express slots. It also features dual Gigabit Ethernet as past high-end Nvidia boards and it looks like it has six rear USB ports, FireWire, eSATA and 7.1-channel audio with optical and coaxial S/PDIF. Unlike Intel, Nvidia has also kept the PS/2 ports.
It also appears to have a total of seven SATA ports, although it’s hard to tell since the seventh port is very close to the iXBT watermark on the picture. Other features include a single IDE and Floppy connector, a two digita debug LED display, onboard power and reset buttons, headers for a further four USB 2.0 ports and one FireWire port and that pretty much sums things up.
