XFX nForce 790i Ultra Motherboard Preview @ [H]

well this mobo does have limitations as I've stated
Anything 11 multi results ina bsod.
Currently stuck at 1600x10 with the odd core dying in Prime so I need to tune the voltage but 1.288 seems right. Must need to check some other things.
 
let me understand this again….

So this 790i thing is like the only decent thing in the nforce chipset line-up
and to enjoy this fine nforce experience:

1-I’ll have to pay about $350 for a board like EVGA 790i Ultra SLI, XFX 790i Ultra SLI or ASUS Striker II Extreme (though a $90 board like the GA-P35-DS3L could be all what I need)
2-then pay another $500-$800 for a 2X2GB DDR3 instead of a $70-$180 2X2GB DDR2@1066 that will never give any less performance
3-then pick those 2 super nice GeForce cards
4-then enjoy the SLI annoying experience
5-and of course taste those delicious extra 10-20 FPS at Cryshit

that’s fine for me, the only thing that made me change my mind and stick with intel mobo’s is that weird voice in my head that keeps telling me: just like every other SLI mobo it’ll eventually fry itself
 
like it was on the 680i ? Is it whinning, squaling or whatever ? Or it's dead silent at 50%....

thanks
 
sd11 said:
We live in the market of today. And nforce doesn't stack up on intel platforms, and intel has tweaking chipsets.



Fanboyism. The benefits from the competition are the better chips intel is selling today. When the P4 was getting creamed by the AMD64 prices were higher for good parts. Things are extremely cheap today.
Click to expand...

Talk about fanboyism :p
 
firas said:
2-then pay another $500-$800 for a 2X2GB DDR3 instead of a $70-$180 2X2GB DDR2@1066 that will never give any less performance
Click to expand...

Pricing on DDR3 is coming down fast...$360 for 2x2gb DDR3-1333 atm, wasn't that long ago you'd pay more than that for 2x2gb of DDR2-1066
 
theproject said:
wooot! man i want one of those... :D

p.s kyle... its not a cardboard box... its a corrogated box *as i sit at my desk in a corregated box manufacturing plant*
Click to expand...


Hehe, you made me LOL. Guess I am showing my knowledge on the packaging front eh? ;) Thanks for the correction, I will not screw that up again.
 
It's a bit OT, but I have to ask...is that stand you're using for the review a custom built unit, or something anyone can grab from somewhere else? I ask because

A. I'm looking for an open air test area.
B. The top level of it looks extremely similar to my Ratpadz XT. ;)
 
tsuehpsyde said:
It's a bit OT, but I have to ask...is that stand you're using for the review a custom built unit, or something anyone can grab from somewhere else? I ask because

A. I'm looking for an open air test area.
B. The top level of it looks extremely similar to my Ratpadz XT. ;)
Click to expand...

It looks like one of these to me: http://www.highspeedpc.com/
 
HotBBQ said:
Here is some OCZ DDR3-1333 for $150 after MIR. It seems people are having no problem getting these to DDR3-1600 speeds. These same modules were ~$250 about six weeks ago. DDR3 prices are really starting to move downwards.
Click to expand...

I noticed that too! :) Exciting to see DDR3 prices finally starting to come down. Nevertheless, I think Im still going to wait another 3-4 months at least before I make the jump, as I think we will be seeing at least another 20-30% price drop over the next quarter or two. The performance benefits just dont seem worth it yet imo.
 
Excellent preview and I really appreciate the fact that you guys took such pains to stress test the board like that. I'm not currently in the market for a new MB, but it's useful information regardless. I can certainly attest to the fact that I'll always check this site for previews/reviews before I make any significant hardware purchase and this preview easily makes the case that it's a very prudent thing to do. Thanks!
 
Nice preview. Stability is crucial. Currently running 680i with 1066 FSB and it is rock solid. I jumped in after the issues were addressed. Love SLI.

Good to see SLI, DDR3, and Intel's latest CPU finally coming together. And all of it getting greener is good too. Right now this is a good candidate for the next build later this year.
 
Hi

Very comprehensive coverage however I am missing two things.

1. What level of stress does different raid set on the CPU, Does the raid work on windows only?
2. How does this card behave under linux?
 
I also am wondering how SLI will be with linux. I'm running Ubuntu Fiesty right now, and it's well with my BFG 6800 OC (still running f*ing awesome after the last 3 yrs- see here- http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=891618 on an Asus A7V8X-E....
and yeah I am still a BFG man. Amazing customer support and great cards! Go ahead and call me a fanboi all you want, they friggin rock!)
but I am wondering about how the BFG 8800GT's in SLI or even tri-SLI will be with linux on this board. Any word?
 
I have this board setup in a new build and I am having nothing but trouble with it. It has been, so far, IMPOSSIBLE to install Raid on this board. I can install to a single Sata drive perfectly fine, but anything even remotely related to Raid causes issues. I am actually sitting here tinkering with a damn 3.5" floppy drive to try and get Raid working. Problem is I can't find Raid drivers at all. Even on XFX's website they do not list them. They have plenty of Raid drivers for the older boards, but nothing for this one.
 
try on pair ports ports

First, you need find the pair of sata ports, active raid into the bios (use) A0 A1 or B0 b1, I dont know what is the identification on this board but in my 680i is a0 a1 b0 b1 c0 c1. a0 and a1 are the internal sata port side off flopy conector

 
Well, I end up figuring it out. I had to dust off a 3.5" floppy drive and a PS2 adapter for my keyboard just to get XP to install. The drivers where on the disk that came with the mobo (should have looked there first, dur). But to install them I had to use the floppy since there is no other type of media that can install 3rd party raid controllers. No flash drives, no CD's nada. Not sure why the Raid controller drivers aren't just part of the BIOS these days. I'd be totally screwed if I didn't have this spare floppy sitting in my closet, or the extra computer to install the drives to the disk with. Running back and forth between the two computers carriny my monitor/keyboard/floppy about 7 times was just wonderful. I had to keep installing to the floppy because the one disk I have had some bad sectors. The best part about the Raid drivers not being install is that it doesn't tell you this is the problem, it just throws a BSOD with one of those (0x006677d0) type errors (this isnt the actual one). I had to dink around online for a few hours to figure it out.

I got hit with an error "Can't copy idecoi.dll", which comes from the floppy drive. I ended up just skipping it after not getting it to work correctly for about 2 hours.

What a freakin' nightmare this was. And now when I do boot up, the Raid utility tells me that both SATA drives that are part of the Raid are no longer "healthy". Not sure if that has anything to do with skipping the install of the file or not, considering the utility tells me this before windows even gets started. Ugh.

Out of all the Xfx 790i reviews/previews I read, NONE of them bothered to test the Raid systems at all. Maybe these things are still just to problematic for sites to bother. This is my first forray into Raid, and I have to say I am not even remotely impressed with it. What a drag. I still have no clue if I am even running in Raid or not at this point.
===============================================================================================

EDIT: 3/30/08 - Well evidentally I was NOT running in raid after what I posted above. After doing some updates and game installs it occured to me I should just check if any other drives are showing up, and what do you know, I had an E: drive that was the same size as my C: drive. And shocker, it has XP files installed on it, but none of the games I had. So evidentally it was RAID'd for long enough to get some XP files installed.

I went back to try and complete the install by getting the idecio.dll file installed instead of skipping it. To do this I stumbled across a solution that instructed to rename the file, as it is on the floppy, to Idecio.dll (capitalize the first letter). And it worked....

An entire RAID install on a brand new 790i mobo held up because the first letter in a file on a FLOPPY needs to be capatilized..... just awesome.

Incidentally, Crysis runs freakin' stupid fast now vs. my old machine that was rocking a single core and an 8xAGP card.
 
I doubt I will be going nVidia next time round. My first 680i board was an unstable Striker Extreme from Asus and I had to send it back and pay for shipping. Then I got the Abit 680i IN9-32X and had problems again until I realized that these boards have trouble running ram above 800mhz. My 1067mhz ram was just a waste of money. I think the limit was 900mhz for ram... but I've had no issues except for the X-Fi having hiccups during gameplay, but it took my mb maker a year to release a bios that addressed the issue... well about when it went obsolete anyhow...

Then there is the slow nforce motherboard driver releases and video card driver releases... that ticked me off pretty much... so I guess you can keep 790i. Its way too overpriced anyhow. Will be going X48 all the way once prices come down...

Later.
 
Hi Guys,

I took the plunge and bought the EVGA 790i Ultra Motherboard and I just love it.
Its fast in windows vista 64bit with service pack 1 works very well with Quadcore 9450 and Patriot PC3 1333 2GB x2 DDR3.:D
 
VE2007 said:
Do you follow everyone's ass
Click to expand...


no, it just so happened i came upon two posts outlining your spec-list in a matter of minutes.

that comment i made above was uncalled for, agreed.

here's hoping for some more positive experiences with the 790i to show up in writing here.
 
And what does my eye see, trouble in 790i land?:
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3283&p=21

NVIDIA's 790i has already proven itself a very capable platform for overclocking, something we did not expect to say considering this is the first (and last?) DDR3 memory controller from the green team. Performance is great, overclocking is easy, and NVIDIA has even managed to keep power consumption in check. By every account, the 790i is a real contender when placed side-by-side with Intel's X48 Express chipset. However, there is a dark side to this chipset. We are working with NVIDIA at this time to figure out our random data corruption problems. We have lost several drive images during testing. While we expect to corrupt drive images when pushing a system beyond its boundaries, this problem has occurred numerous times with fairly ordinary overclocks. Typically, settings around 400FSB (QDR 1600) and memory set at DDR3-1600 with relaxed timings around 7-7-7-18 resulted in random, but not repeatable corrupted images in Vista. NVIDIA is busily testing at this point and we will have an update shortly.
Click to expand...
 
Now that it is 3 months after the last post, have you guys seen any improvements?
Any bios updates that improve performance?
Any updates that have addressed the AnandTech data corruption issue?

I am on the verge of creating a new system and am leaning toward xfx 790i.

What's the latest word?
 
It is good. Just be careful with your ram selection. Crucial worked well for me. Set up the ram timings manually. Q9450@3500MHz rock solid.
 
work strong, but you need choice good set ram, corsair 1333 work fine, ocz 1600eb stable but have problem in the first boot with the vram you need have over 1,7vlt all time, STT 1800 pryect X unstable, I need find the way for make stable.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top