Performance Tests
With so much similarity between the 680i SLI and the 780i SLI chipsets, we really don’t expect to see any performance differences between them.  Everything from the memory controller, to storage controller and accessories performance is lining up exactly as we saw it on the 680i chipsets.  And with Intel’s X38 and X48 chipsets out (or soon at least in the case of the X48), NVIDIA has an uphill battle on their hands until their own DDR3 memory chipset is available later this year.

Test System Setup

CPU

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 @ 3.0 GHz

Motherboard

 XFX nForce 780i SLI (DDR2)
Asus P5E3 Deluxe X38 (DDR3)

Memory

 Corsair CM2X2048-9136C5D
Corsair CM3X2048-1800C7D

Hard Drive

Western Digital Raptor X 150GB WD1500ADFD

Sound Card

SB Audigy 2 Value

Video Card

 NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB

Video Drivers

 NVIDIA 169.18
Power Supply Silverstone Zeus 750 watt

DirectX Version

DX10

Operating System

Windows Vista Ultimate x64


First, let’s take a look at our more synthetic CPU and memory tests:

XFX nForce 780i SLI Motherboard Review - Motherboards 66

XFX nForce 780i SLI Motherboard Review - Motherboards 67

XFX nForce 780i SLI Motherboard Review - Motherboards 68

XFX nForce 780i SLI Motherboard Review - Motherboards 69

With DDR3 memory, the Asus P5E3 motherboard based on the X38 chipset does have a slight advantage, but not much at the 1066 MHz speeds we ran it at.  And both CineBench 10 and POV-Ray 3.7 show nearly identical performance across the platform.

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