Nvidia has officially launched a series of chipsets: the nForce 780a SLI, 750a SLI, 730a, 720a, and 710a as well as the GeForce 8300, 8200 and 8100 which are all destined for the AMD platform and with HyperTransport 3.0 support. They all ended up with a DirectX 10 GPU and the difference between the GeForce and nForce is the possibility of adding an HDMI output for the former and support of "classic" SLI for the latter.
The big innovation of course is the slightly delayed arrival of Hybrid SLI which is no longer presented. It would seem that perfecting the bios and sufficient drivers was long and fastidious, which doesn’t mean this new flagship technology is immune to certain limitations – at least for the moment. For example, the activation of Hybrid Power is still manual. Finally, you will obviously need a compatible graphic card. Up until now, only the GeForce 8400 GS and 8500 GT are GeForce Boost-capable and for HybridPower-capable cards, you will have to look towards the GeForce 9800 GX2 and 9800 GTX.
nForce 780aThe nForce 700a reminds us of the
700i and with good reason as it also integrates the nForce 200. Connected in PCI-Express to the Northbridge, this chip enables managing 32 PCI-Express 2.0 lanes that can be devoted to 2 to 4 graphic ports. Consequently, we may fear that available bandwidth between the nForce 200 and graphic cards is much larger than the amount between this bridge and the Northridge. For triple SLI, there are three x16 ports, two of which are cabled in x8.
For the rest, we find up to 5 PCI ports, 12 USB 2.0 ports, 6 SATA-II and 2 PATA connections, while there is RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5 support. Of course, there is Native Gigabit Ethernet as well as HDA (Azalia) for sound. A slight detour to this rather exhaustive Nvidia
PDF, document on the subject could be useful in making a proper choice.
