Today we bring you our first look at the new Nvidia nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset, and without messing around, we have put it head to head with the nForce 780i SLI, which it will ultimately replace. The nForce 790i Ultra SLI is a more refined chipset, but can it possibly squeeze any more performance out of the already lightning fast Core 2 platform?

Initial tests indicated that the nForce 780i SLI and the nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset were very close in performance, and it was not until we began to test them using SLI that a significant performance difference became noticeable. Ideally for the most accurate comparison it would have been best to use the nForce 790i SLI (non-Ultra) version, which supports DDR2 memory (no such motherboard is available to us just yet). That said, in the past we have found the performance of low-latency DDR2-800 memory to be very similar to that of DDR3-1333 memory and often DDR2 memory is found to be faster at these speeds.



Link: Legion Hardware