nForce 790i will be NVIDIA’s first real PCIe 2.0 chipset, when it arrives in April costing $300+. The 780i arrived earlier, but it’s really nothing more than the 680i chipset with a PCIe 2.0 bridge chip. Also, the new power circuits of the 780i boards made it possible for them to run Intel’s new 45nm quad-cores. nForce 790i will also be the first NVIDIA platform sporting DDR3, and here NVIDIA has gone all the way and added support for up to DDR3-2000 with the flagship model. That’s not all though. There are a few more tweaks to the 790i chip.
nForce 790i will bring something we can call enhanced SLI. It’s mainly two new features called PW Shortcut and Broadcast. PW Shortcut creates a direct path between the GPUs, via the northbridge. This should not only improve performance of SLI systems, but most of all take a load off the CPU, as with a normal SLI systems it has to go GPU#1 > northbridge > CPU > northbridge > GPU#2. Broadcast allows the CPU to send information to all GPUs of a system with a single packet.
Last, but not least a word from a friend on the cooling:
“The cooling is going to be so excessive (bunch of heatpipes) that MSI’s circuspipe [sic] cooling will look sensible and held-back. 790i will be one hot chip.”
ASUS R.O.G. Striker II Extreme, which is based on the 790i chipset, uses hybrid cooling with a water block on the northbridge, but that didn’t tell us much because ASUS has used hybrid cooling with other chipsets when it wasn’t actually needed. In this case it might be.
