Introduction

While it may be hard to believe now, there was a time when NVIDIA – not ATI – was AMD’s most important strategic partner. Let’s rewind a bit. The time period we’re referring to is 2002-2006. The AMD Athlon XP/64 CPUs were strong performers, delivering performance that was at least on par with, if not faster than the equivalent processor from Intel, but the AMD platform as a whole was coming under fire from some critics due to nagging issues with VIA-based chipsets and their compatibility problems with devices ranging from Sound Blaster sound cards to USB printers and scanners with large files.

While these issues weren’t the fault of AMD’s processors, their CPUs themselves were rock-solid, the platform was perceived as being buggy and less than 100% reliable in comparison to Intel.

Enter NVIDIA. Their nForce chipsets were the first to introduce cutting edge features which we now take for granted such as dual-channel memory architecture and dual Gigabit Ethernet. In addition while they weren’t always perfect, the nForce platform as a whole has a much better track record than VIA when it comes to compatibility and system stability, and it also doesn’t hurt that the overclocking crowd has had a lot of success with nForce motherboards and scaling.

In more recent years, NVIDIA’s trump card has been SLI. Those three magic letters, S-L-I, have helped NVIDIA sell more graphics cards, and very quickly got NVIDIA a Pentium 4 bus license. If you recall, for years NVIDIA’s chipsets were exclusive to the AMD platform. This was due in part because Intel and NVIDIA couldn’t agree on a price for Intel’s bus license. You see, unlike AMD who licenses their bus for free (including HyperTransport), Intel enjoys royalties from the sale of any chipset that uses their bus to communicate to the processor. Once SLI debuted at the end of 2004 on the AMD platform with the original nForce 4 chipset, NVIDIA and Intel quickly came up with a broad cross-license agreement that has lived to this day.

Since then however, AMD and NVIDIA’s relationship has slowly soured. The nForce 590 chipset was launched just a couple of months ahead of AMD’s stunning acquisition of ATI in July 2006. Since that announcement, NVIDIA hasn’t released another high-end chipset for the AMD platform, skipping the nForce 6 generation (and 3-Way SLI) entirely so they could focus on the Intel platform, where they’ve released nearly a dozen chipsets since nForce 590.

With ATI’s platform group taking on chipset development for AMD, who historically hasn’t had much of a fulltime chipset division, NVIDIA has in some ways been put on the backburner: AMD’s 790FX chipset launched last year to positive reviews. 790FX supports high-end features like HyperTransport 3.0, 4-Way CrossFireX, PCI Express 2.0, and support for AMD’s powerful Overdrive overclocking utility. In fact, enthusiasts have found that the 790FX chipset scales to very high speeds with Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Black Edition CPUs.

In light of AMD’s new 7-series chipsets, NVIDIA’s venerable nForce 590 SLI (and the rest of the nForce 500 family) looks downright antiquated and in desperate need of replacement.


Today NVIDIA is finally getting around to updating their nForce line of chipsets for the AMD platform, and they’ve come up with an entirely new 7-series of chipsets of their own ranging from the nForce 780a SLI on the high-end, down to the 730a chipset for single GPU users. Today we’ll be taking a look at the new 780a platform and ASUS’ upcoming M3N-HT Deluxe.