If you want to run NVIDIA graphics cards in SLI you have to use a motherboard based on any of NVIDIA’s own MCP/chipsets with SLI support. These are the only boards that allows SLI so far, and with the 680i starting to get rather old by now, many were hoping that the upcoming nForce 780i would update the SLI platform with new features, better performance and so forth. However, according to the Chinese site Expreview, nForce 780i is actually pretty much the same chip as 680i, but with a PCIe 2.0 bridge chip added to the board. There are differences in the layouts of the board though, so there might be more changes, but superficially speaking it doesn’t like all that much.
Expreview has also tested an nForce 780i motherboard and compared it with both 680i and various Intel chipsets, and if the picture proof (below) isn’t enough, the graphs tell us the same thing. 780i performs identical to 680i.
Bridge chip to the lower left, MCP to the upper right.
