CES 2008: Asus to Display nForce 780a-Enabled Motherboard

The nForce 680i SLI has been the top chipset product for more than a year, ant it is high time Nvidia retired it, but the newer and more powerful nForce 700 series of chipsets for the AMD platform are expected to arrive later this quarter.

Gigabyte was quite impressive with its GeForce 8200 motherboard the company proudly showcased during the first days of the Consumer Electronics Show. However, those who aren't cheap when it comes to the latest technology should consider Asus' offer.

The Taiwanese PC vendor has come up with a whole load of motherboards to be showcased, along with their diversified notebook palette. Among the motherboards, there are quite a few that come with Nvidia's nForce 700 series of chipsets. Undoubtedly, the most interesting motherboard in the suite is the M3N-HT board, that is built with the brand-new nForce 780a chipset. This is one of the highest-end motherboards produced by Asustek, and is impressively decorated with the copper cooling gear that traverses it.

The motherboard is almost covered in the intricate serpents of the copper cooling system we have already seen on the M3A32-MVP motherboard with the AMD 790FX chipset. The copper is present everywhere, either we want that or no. It covers the chipset, the northbridge, a small part of the CPU power stabilizer as well as the DDRAM slots. Yes, that's true, the passive cooling system includes two detachable RAM heatsinks connected to each other though an U-shaped copper pipe.

The M3N-HT also features AM2+ and dual channel DDR2-1066 support, three PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots (triple SLI-ready), Hybrid SLI, integrated graphics, as well as six SATA 3.0 Gbps ports. Nvidia has included a lot of pleasant surprises to go with the nForce 780a SLI chipset. Of course, such a motherboard should be "crowned" with the latest and fastest AM2+ CPU in the series. However, this will have to wait until Prince Phenom decides to wake up from its TLB erratum sleep.