Nvidia nForce 780a SLI Chipset: Asus Crosshair II Formula Review

It's been quite some time since Nvidia released a new high-end chipset on an AMD platform. In fact, you have to go back to the summer of 2006 and the launch of the AM2 processor, now almost two years later, for the 590SLI chipset. Although it served AM2 processors will it has since become outdated. The 680i chipset which was released on the Intel platform was skipped over for any AMD release but now the 780a is being released which has more in common with the 780i but a few major differences.The first and most prominent feature with the 780a chipset is integrated video onboard allowing for what Nvidia calls Hybrid Power and Hybrid SLI. Basically this allows you to save energy as if you're doing day to day tasks such as web browsing of using a word processor it'll shut off completely you're primary graphics in your PCI-Express slot. When you load up a game your main card starts up, thus saving you plenty of power and heat in what the majority users have as downtime. Quite a neat feature but unfortunately we ran into problems with the Crosshair II trying to enable it and were just short on time so we'll have to look into this and other 780a features later. For now let's move onto our review of Asus' Crosshair II Formula 780a motherboard.

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