Page 10 - Photos eVGA 790i ULTRA SLI
Let's have a look at the new cooler. I really like to say "Ringbus" here ;) The new passive element contains a new circular heat pipe with more fins for better cooling. Also a new vapor chamber is attached to the circular heat pipe and provides more surface area cooling to the nForce 790i SLI MCP. Rather impressive to look at. Though if you overclock you will still need to add a little ventilator (supplied) on top of the SPP (Northbridge) location. And if 100% activated (configurable), still too loud! Though at 50% it's fine (which you'll likely configure it at).
All the way above the LGA 775 socket, high quality mosfets, heatsinks and barely visible the 8-pin power connector especially for dual & quad core processors. It's called the "P4" connector. Typically this is a 4-pin connector.
Now do not worry if your PSU only has the 4-pin model. It'll work fine and will fit just as well. The newer PSU's however have the new 8-pin model connector which can cram 150 Watts directly to these lovely new dual and quad core CPU's.
I must say the the new passive heatpipe cooling looks just stunning. Moving onwards we see the DIMM slots for DDR3 memory.
Obviously go dual-channel with two or four modules. 4 x 240-pin DIMM socket Dual Channel DDR3, a maximum of 8GB of DDR3 1333 MHz to 2000 MHz memory can be used. Make sure that the DIMM colors correspond. The position of the DIMM slots is good, the retention clips are not blocking the graphics card and vice versa. Front panel connectivity has been moved away to a better location, it's good to see that, nVIDIA.
If you decide to go for overclockable DDR3 memory, say 2000 MHz, please insert the memory into the black DIMM slots. This is called a 0101 slot configuration and has to do with the layout of the nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard versus how slot addressing is configured. Apparently it is important for termination to be in those last slots. Not sure why though.
When we move the camera to the left we stumble into the SATA and PATA ports with above it passively cooled the MCP chipset (Southbridge). The block with 88 is actually a debug LED that displays "port 80" codes using two seven-segment displays. It was added for quick troubleshooting. I think that over 150 debug codes can be displayed. So if your CMOS malfunctions, or your memory has an issue, you grab your manual and seek up the error code. Now you know where to look and how to fix it. A pretty cool feature.
The Diagnostic LED has been moved, next to it two additional SATA ports, totalling to six.
Color coding ... finally. From left to right the more colorful stuff are USB, frontpanel, FireWire ports etc. To the left next to the speaker (the black thing with the small hole in it) still present and really handy, micro switches to reset and/or power up/down the PC. A tweakers necessity during his everlasting quest to overclock the memory and processor
When we look to the right we see a blue jumper, this is CLEAR CMOS. Now one thing I'd like to see changed is CLEAR CMOS. I'd love the first manufacturer to make that a micro-switch as well. (Ed: Abit has already done this)
Overclocking results into system hangs if you push too far. Now nForce has a protection build it, if your PC does not POST anymore after three times it's revert back to safe settings and POST. This however doesn't always work 100%, and in that case you need to CLEAR CMOS, and gosh golly .. it would be nice to see the jumper gone and the micro-switched.
Last photo of the mainboard then; 3 x PCIe x16 Graphics expansion slots, 2 x PCIe x1 (the small black slots), 2 x PCI 32-bit (black) with support for PCI 2.1
Enough of the mainboard though, we have a system to build. Let's look at the ESA components I've been telling you about.
