Motherboard Design and Layout
Since instituting the Built by NVIDIA program, I have been impressed with the motherboards from their partners. NVIDIA’s engineers are very good at getting the most performance out of their own chipsets as well as the laying out a board that works very well for an enthusiast.
The first glance at the board shows the traditional yet striking green on black design with a gunmetal finish heat pipe system for chipset cooling. You’re going to be paying a lot for this motherboard so might as well look as good as it performs, right?
The area surrounding the processor socket seems very cramped though in my installation attempts I had no issues with either water cooling or standard heat sink setups. The circular heat pipe that surrounds the processor uses the air from standard cooling fans to help cool itself but cant seem rather restricting if you have very large cooling apparatus. In general, I would think no users will have major problems.
The DIMM sockets are very close to the north bridge and this is probably by design in order to get the most overclocking headroom. As I will describe later, this mother board requires you to populate the black DIMM slots in order to get the best overclocks. You can also see in this photo four of the six SATA connections that base south bridge provides as well as the primary IDE channel.
The primary ATX power connection is slightly cramped but was still accessible for easy installation and removal.
The primary ATX power connection is slightly cramped but was still accessible for easy installation and removal.
The circular to the hype design on the motherboard effectively cools the north bridge, south bridge and power regulation components for the processor. A vapor chamber is attached to the circuit the height in order to provide more service area to cool efficiently. Even though the 790i chipset runs cooler than the 780i chipset, NVIDA’s chose to go with even larger cooling for better overclocking potential.
If you really want to push the system to its limits you should attach the optional, but included, chipset fan that simply snaps into place. NVIDIA claims that it’s not necessary for stocks speeds and settings though I would guess most users will install it anyway unless they are going for an extremely quiet system.
For the expansion configuration the EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard you get three PCI Express X16 slots, the first and third of which run at a full X16 bandwidth and the center connection runs on the PCIe 1.0 connection from the south bridge. There are two legacy PCI slots and two PCIe X1 slots for accessories.
