Costly, And Perhaps Early

NVIDIA’s only offerings aren’t just the new range of graphics cards, but also motherboard chipsets. The 790i chipset for Intel processors is one of the top models offered today, and the Zotac nForce 790i Supreme is based on it.

The board design and layout is the same as the stock layout used by NVIDIA. There are no additional cooling enhancements. There are plenty of heat sinks and heat pipes connecting them, but the quality isn’t all that great. The big difference in the 790i chipsets is that these are DDR3-only boards. There are four slots for up to 8 GB of memory.

The board supports 3-way SLI. The BIOS is clean and is pretty standard with nothing out of the way. There are several over clocking features. The HD audio solution is based on Azalia and there is a dual Gigabit LAN built into the board.

In terms of performance, it matches the P35 and X48 chipset motherboards that we tested. Even the hard drive marks matched other motherboards of its class. The drive index for our drive showed 78 MBps but the memory benchmark was a tiny bit higher than the ones on the P35 boards running DDR2 memory. There was a minor 5 to 6 per cent in the memory benchmarks, but it didn’t translate to performance in real world benchmarks such as games.

The entire package doesn’t come with anything special, other than the usual cables and back panels. A WiFi kit is also included.