More than five months ago, NVIDIA announced the industry’s first hybrid technology for PC platforms during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. During this time, they also showed off the nForce 780a SLI motherboards that were due out in Q1 2008. It seems things got pushed back as NVIDIA is officially announcing the nForce 7 series today in Q2 2008.
"We compared the nForce 780a SLI to the AMD 780G since we wanted to test out the integrated graphics and PureVideo HD functionality as well as general performance. It seems to have paid off; the test results were interesting as the HD DVD playback testing over the HDMI output showed that NVIDIA passed up ATI when it comes to offloading the CPU usage. NVIDIA claims that an HT3-based Phenom CPU is required to provide the necessary bandwidth when playing HD video using the motherboard GPU. Our testing showed this is not true, but NVIDIA claims moving from a HT1 processor to HT3 will give the integrated graphics the bandwidth it needs to better render HD content. This is something we will check out later, because if we are impressed with what a 2.5GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core CPU can do with HT1, we'd better be sitting down for some Phenom 50-series action..."
Hmmm, now that's interesting indeed... join me in checking their review
here.
- CL
