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XFX nForce 750a SLI Motherboard Review :: nForce 750a SLI Features
NVIDIA recently launched the new nForce 750a platform as a mid-range board that supports SLI to fit in between the nForce 780a and nForce 730a chipsets. The nForce 750a has most of the features of the 780a with the notable exception of the lack of an nForce 200 chip. The nForce 200 chip provides extra PCI Express lanes to the 18 that are found on the nForce 750 MCP chip, allowing two simultaneous X16 lanes in PCI Express mode. The nForce 750a MCP has a total of 18 PCI Express lanes. In SLI mode, the 16 lanes assigned to the graphics card are split into two x8 lanes. This gives the same bandwidth between the graphics card and the chipset as the old Generation 1 PCI Express x16 slot, 4GB/second. Video cards, even the fastest ones like the GTX280 do not saturate the PCI Express x16 bus of the first generation much less PCI Express 2.0. The integrated graphics are a bit of a freebie but serves several purposes. First it saves power by HybridPower. This allows the end-user to turn off the discrete graphics card and use the integrated graphics when 2D operations like Word or surfing the WWW are required. When 3D games and applications that require the discrete graphics card are used, the discrete graphics card will be enabled, increasing the power draw. The second benefit of the integrated graphics is HybridSLI. This works by adding a low-end discrete graphics card like the 8500GT/8400GS and increasing performance of the integrated graphics by a factor of almost two due to the process of SLI almost doubling performance of the integrated graphics alone. This feature is almost useless for most users as the discrete graphics cards have dropped in price so that the 9500GT which NVIDIA just launched is available for $69, offering much more performance than the 8600GT combination integrated graphics+8500GT would offer. The third benefit of the integrated graphics on a SLI board is the ability to run the computer without a discrete graphics card. This is especially useful if you can’t afford the high-end cards, want to use the computer as a server, use it as part of a HTPC computer or in an emergency as in your new GTX280 card needing RMA replacement. The integrated 8200 graphics on the nForce 750a SLI chipset are based upon the GeForce 8200 integrated graphics found on motherboards of that name with the same specifications except a 1500MHz Shader clock.  3DMark Vantage XFX states that their nForce 750a SLI motherboard supports the 95W TDP AMD Socket AM2+ CPUs. One thing to note is I was able to install and run all of our standard motherboard tests with the 125W TDP AMD Phenom X4 9850 CPU we use for our AMD platform. At no point were issues found with this combination in running any of the tests and in fact the performance was the highest on this combination in almost every test. Also tested on this board was an AMD Phenom x4 9950 which was just released. The 9950 has a TDP of 140W and no issues were found with that CPU on this board. Contents:
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