Live OR Die
12-20-2007, 05:54 AM
Its interesting they are saying they got the intel 45nm Penryn 1600FSB QX9770 working with two simple BIOS tweaks :rockout:
http://img.techpowerup.org/071220/Untitled.jpg
So the product we'll be testing today is the flagship enthusiast targeted Intel processor mainboard. It's based on the nForce 780i (with an i for Intel) SLI chipset and the product as tested today comes from the good people at XFX. The product is based on a 6 layer PCB; NVIDIA's own design and consists of three discrete chips, both known the 780i MCP and the 780i SPP, also called North and South bridge's as is more commonly accepted. The third being the tiny nForce 200 chip. The NVIDIA nForce 200 chip is nothing more than a PCI Express switch chip with one upstream port and up to four downstream ports allowing all your PCIe functionality at full or if preferred less bandwidth (4x8 PCIe lanes)...
The SPP and MCP are fabricated on TSMC's 90nm process technology. The new chipset brings support for the latest Socket 775 processors from Intel:
Quad Core Yorkfield & duo core Wolfdale (45nm Penryn)
Current (Kentsfield) Quad core & Duo Core processors (Conroe 65nm)
All LGA775 Pentium processors
The one exception for the new 45nm products is Intel's 1600 MHz FSB flagship product QX9770 Yorkfield processor, officially it's not supported. We however had this CPU (Intel engineering Sample) available, tried it... and after two simple BIOS tweaks it worked straight out of the box, despite NVIDIA not being rather enthusiastic about that.
That alone is reason enough for me to continue the test as yes, I am Dutch and yes... therefore rather stubborn :)
We'll test the QX9770 processor in this review. This is an Intel engineering sample processor though, so that doesn't mean that the final product will work, be warned about this. But honestly, the nForce 780i can manage a 1600 MHz FSB quite easily so there's no real reason not to try it out. From another point of view, I'd suggest the Core 2 Extreme Quad Core QX9650 anyway, a little cheaper and it can overclock to 4 GHz so darn easily (read our review here).
With the release of 3-way SLI (preview here) NVIDIA wanted to make sure that the third card used now also has full x16 PCIe lanes available (on 680i the middle PCIe was a x8 slot). So effectively nForce 780i now has three PCIe x16 slots bringing you the maximum bandwidth available. Two are PCIe 2.0 and connected to the SPP, the third (middle slot) is PCIe 1.0 and is being pulled from the MCP Southbridge).
The Full Review here www.guru3d.com (http://www.guru3d.com/article/nforce_780i_sli_review/482/2/)
http://img.techpowerup.org/071220/Untitled.jpg
So the product we'll be testing today is the flagship enthusiast targeted Intel processor mainboard. It's based on the nForce 780i (with an i for Intel) SLI chipset and the product as tested today comes from the good people at XFX. The product is based on a 6 layer PCB; NVIDIA's own design and consists of three discrete chips, both known the 780i MCP and the 780i SPP, also called North and South bridge's as is more commonly accepted. The third being the tiny nForce 200 chip. The NVIDIA nForce 200 chip is nothing more than a PCI Express switch chip with one upstream port and up to four downstream ports allowing all your PCIe functionality at full or if preferred less bandwidth (4x8 PCIe lanes)...
The SPP and MCP are fabricated on TSMC's 90nm process technology. The new chipset brings support for the latest Socket 775 processors from Intel:
Quad Core Yorkfield & duo core Wolfdale (45nm Penryn)
Current (Kentsfield) Quad core & Duo Core processors (Conroe 65nm)
All LGA775 Pentium processors
The one exception for the new 45nm products is Intel's 1600 MHz FSB flagship product QX9770 Yorkfield processor, officially it's not supported. We however had this CPU (Intel engineering Sample) available, tried it... and after two simple BIOS tweaks it worked straight out of the box, despite NVIDIA not being rather enthusiastic about that.
That alone is reason enough for me to continue the test as yes, I am Dutch and yes... therefore rather stubborn :)
We'll test the QX9770 processor in this review. This is an Intel engineering sample processor though, so that doesn't mean that the final product will work, be warned about this. But honestly, the nForce 780i can manage a 1600 MHz FSB quite easily so there's no real reason not to try it out. From another point of view, I'd suggest the Core 2 Extreme Quad Core QX9650 anyway, a little cheaper and it can overclock to 4 GHz so darn easily (read our review here).
With the release of 3-way SLI (preview here) NVIDIA wanted to make sure that the third card used now also has full x16 PCIe lanes available (on 680i the middle PCIe was a x8 slot). So effectively nForce 780i now has three PCIe x16 slots bringing you the maximum bandwidth available. Two are PCIe 2.0 and connected to the SPP, the third (middle slot) is PCIe 1.0 and is being pulled from the MCP Southbridge).
The Full Review here www.guru3d.com (http://www.guru3d.com/article/nforce_780i_sli_review/482/2/)