Nvidia is pushing hard on the platform front with its technology portfolio ESA, EPP 2.0 and SLI are all core Nvidia products associated with the nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard and this launch. While some are open standards, so no royalties are claimed when using them, it doesn't mean all is well for the ultra-high-end user.

To say the cost of upgrading to use the nForce 790i (Ultra) SLI is significant is certainly an understatement: on top of one of the most expensive motherboards ever sold, you'll need super expensive performance DDR3 memory (with EPP 2.0) to make the most of it. Then there's the fact that running at over 1,600MHz limits the board to just
two DIMM slots, so running 4GB in 2x2GB has just gone from selling organs to selling your children as well.

There is a value add with all manners of SLI support, but you can get that with plenty of other nForce 7-series boards, although in this case the north bridge is tweaked to use SLI better. ESA is entirely optional if you want to invest in it or not and again provides an upgrade feature choice that said, we expect this more to be jumped upon by companies that build complete systems, rather than end users.

It was designed to be too expensive and a niche product, so don't get your knickers in a twist. While you may care about that because you want the latest and greatest, Nvidia doesn't. And you can bet your cotton socks that the top Futuremark slots will all consist of nForce 790i SLI boards going forwards that's prime marketing material above all else.

Be wary of what's coming out in the next few months too: there's no telling what else Nvidia will launch in the summer on the Intel front, because it has promised a chipset that sports Hybrid SLI support, and would you want to spend all that money on a new board and not have access to these new technologies? Well, maybe not in actual fact, because those running a 30" monitor (an expensive likelihood with this) aren't likely to care about the significant power savings offered by Hybrid SLI. The first incarnation of Hybrid SLI might be one to skip then. Does the nForce 790i Ultra SLI then become an investment for the constantly-upgrading early adopter? Quite Probably. But how many of
those are there?

Rated at 5-5-5-18, the OCZ Technology PC2-8000 Platinum Edition 4GB DDR2 kit is quite impressive in terms of timings, speed, and capacity. Running at 1000MHz it was able to outperform competition in the form of DDR2 from Patriot and DDR3 from OCZ Technology. While overclocked to 1080MHz it was even able to outperform the DDR3 kit running at 1333MHz.

For most folks, the name Rosewill means peripherals. Whether you are looking for enclosures, switches, keyboards, KVM devices or external enclosures, Rosewill likely has something that fits the bill. They are also generally known for offering a product for a reasonable price, something that isn’t always a common practice in today’s marketplace.

On the table this time around is one of their newer external hard drive enclosures, the RX81-MP-SC; this is an enclosure designed to fit SATA hard drives in an easy to use manner. With SATA drives becoming the standard, IDE devices are getting to a point where they are no longer needed, but an external SATA enclosure can be a true friend for those looking for a means to back up important data.

Overclocking the XFX 9800GX2 was fairly simple. Just keep ratcheting up the clocks and the scores keep going up. I figured with a core speed of 600MHz I might be able to push to 700MHz. I went well beyond that and hit 768MHz, a 168MHz improvement over stock. The memory scaled very nicely as well, reaching 1106MHz, or 206MHz over the stock settings. The shader clocks scaled along with the core and ended up at 1944MHz. All things told, I was amazed at the increases in the clock speeds. The overclocked scores in this review do not tell all of the story.