EVGA has just announced a special upgrade for it's 680i mobo customers so we can upgrade to a new 780i series mobo.It's not free but hey it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a new mobo!!
not worth it unless going tri-SLI or getting a Penryn chip, inferior to 680i and all other chipsets on the market.
the 780i SLI reviews, one was posted here on DH (news), the boards score less on nearly all synthetic benches except for memory latencies. the boards loose a couple points in 3DMark, PCMark, HDD access times, I/O a second, MB/s, power at idle, and even game play and the interface is slightly off of the true PCI-E 2.0 bus speed its really just a slapped together setup with 570i southbridge, 680i chipset and an added nForce 200 controller. only good for perephial performance and the tri-SLI bandwidth X38 chipsets kick the crap out of them on every level really.... i think the 700 series is only a stop-gap for some real monstrosity of a chipset i dont think they can stick a rebranded 680i on a DDR3 platform so i think thats a whole new chip there, kinda wanna see
Personaly,the 780i is nVidias answer to the fact that the 680i "which was supposed to support 45nm intel next gen cpu's" doesn't.If you visit the eVGA forums you'll see the thread "680i and 45nm support" is now locked,which happened at the same time the 780i upgrade program was announced.The shame of it is nVidia and or eVGA should have come out and should have been honest enough to say oop's the 680i's wont run penryn chips.They didn't they kept quiet and are now offering at least eVGA is offering this new mobo as a paid for upgrade to those who own the 680i and want to run a penryn chip either wolfdale or yorkshire.Plus the added kicker of sli-3-way.The question I have is will the 680i run three-way sli???? With a bios update???? Zardon or any of the site admins do you know??
yes it can run tri SLi but theres the bandwidth issue on the middle slot for the 680i board, i dont think it will run more than 4x speeds nvidia fixed that up with the nForce 200 chip to control the middle slot with 4.5GT/s .5GT/s short of true PCI-E 2.0 if you are truely going tri- SLI, by all means go for it. if you are going dual SLI and want to go tri when the cards come out, go for it if you plan on buying a Yorkfield (not Yorkshire) Quad-Core or Wolfdale Dual-Core, go for it. if you are just going to dual 8800GTs then it probably isnt going to be worth it. 8800GTs wont tri-SLI and they have yet to consume the bandwidth of the PCI-E 1.1 spec.
I saw the 780i chipset today while window shopping, and from what I've gathered, it's really no different than the 680i SLI chipset, spare Tri SLI, and a N/B (MCP) cooler you could likely grill your dinner with. I'm still buying a Maximus Formula, despite the potential $90 upgrade option thru EVGA.
i dunno.... sure the board sucks, but ATi cards are just not up to the task of power X38 is awesome and all but yea......no SLi unless ATi can punch out their X2s tomorrow or something, they got nothing
the 680i board will only support the dual core 45nm CPUs, but not the quad core 45nm CPUs. also, the current 680i board does support 3-way SLI, but like kris mentions, there's bandwith limitation on that 3rd PCI-E slot. currently, ATI has nothing on NVIDIA a REALLY long time :lol:
