jmke

As the NVIDIA 790i reference boards have been in the marketplace for over six months now, our initial expectations for general peripheral compatibility on the 790i FTW are quite high. We'd expect that many of the faults highlighted by prolonged use of the reference design boards will now be ironed out, so these fixes can be transplanted directly into the backbone of the 790i FTW BIOS.

On the flipside, we already know there's a few things we need to look out for based our past experiences with the 790i SPP/MCP Northbridge/Southbridge combination. Specifically, there's the notorious potential for SATA OS drive corruption when the790i chipset is pushed to its limits. Of course, this can happen on any board and chipset if you get a little over zealous, but it seems the NVIDIA 6 and 7 series chipsets have been more susceptible to this issue than any other competing chipset. There's not really anything positive we can say about this situation other than the fact that boards based on these chipsets are usually best run in a conservative rather than aggressive manner. However, the FTW does beg to be pushed a little, so we're going to put our convictions aside while we do just that.

This won't be a hugely in depth review, as a very comprehensive 790i chipset overclocking guide has already been provided within our ASUS Striker II Extreme review. We'll briefly compare performance against some of the other enthusiast boards we've reviewed this year, and then perhaps throw caution to the wind and try our hands at a little sub-zero benchmarking. With all that said, let's move on to board specifications and features.

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3450

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