Legit Reviews

To improve the time to market for this motherboard series, NVIDIA opted to use an NVIDIA nForce 200 chipset to add the new features of the board. Traditional motherboards have two chipsets on them: a north bridge, which Nvidia calls a System Platform Processor (SPP), and the south bridge, which Nvidia calls the Media Communications Processor (MCP). The NVIDIA 780i motherboard has a third chipset on it now, which is the nForce 200. The nForce 200 connects directly to the north bridge and adds 32 lanes of PCIe 2.0 connectivity that can be split evenly between a pair of physical x16 slots. There are not enough lanes for three physical x16 PCI Express 2.0 slots, so the thrid lane goes directly through the nForce 780i SLI MCP. Of the 62 PCIe lanes, 32 are PCI Express 2.0 and they are all thanks to the nForce 200 chipset. This isn't the best way to implement 3-way SLI support, but it works.

FZ1 wrote:No eSATA? I don't know what all new boards don't have this. Sounds like a perfromer though!