XFX nForce 750i SLI Motherboard Review :: XFX nForce 750i Layout

The CPU area of the board is interesting in that the Northbridge heatsink on the XFX board is higher than normal NB heatsinks. I had no issues with a wide cooler but it is possible some of the wider coolers like the CoolerMaster V8 might interfere with the NB heatsink height. A normal Intel CPU heatsink does not have a problem and several other CPU coolers were able to fit without issue.

The board has two PCI Express x16 slots that are PCI Express Generation 2.0. Due to the nature of the nForce 750i chipset, the chipset cannot support two cards running in x16 mode immediately. There is a nForce 200 chip to provide bandwidth of x16 and x8 when two cards are installed. This is a compromise that should work very well when two NVIDIA video cards are installed. The motherboard has proper spacing to put two video cards with dual-slot or even three slot cards without interfering with each other.

The 24-pin power connector is located on the bottom of the board under the memory slots. The 8-pin power connector is on the top of the board on the right hand side of the CPU heatsink. This is the perfect spot for the 8-pin power connector as it leads directly from the PSU to the connector without worrying about cables going over the CPU fan or airflow concerns.

The onboard drive expansion on this board is dictated by the nForce 750i's support of up to four SATA ports on the board. The board has four sideways facing SATA ports, which means that the nForce 750i SLI board from XFX supports up to four SATA devices. In an interesting twist, XFX decided to include not one but two IDE ports as well as the FDD port controlled by the JMicron SATA controller. The modern motherboard has no need for two IDE ports, but as the controllers on the board support it, the inclusion is a positive in case you have an older IDE DVD drive or IDE HDD.

Onboard sound is provided by a Realtek ALC888S CODEC. The ALC888S is a fully featured High Definition Audio solution that supports 7.1+2 Channel simultaneous output through 10 DAC channels. The ALC88S supports 16/20/24-bit SPDIF input and output. Onboard audio such as the ALC888S has virtually taken over the audio market for non-professional audio solutions from companies like Creative Labs and Aureal which are all but gone from the add-in market.

The rear IO on the board is interesting in that it has a combo PS/2 mouse and keyboard port. This allows users that have a PS/2 keyboard and USB mouse to use that combination without wasting the space for an extra PS/2 port. The onboard sound has six audio jacks, an optical S/PDIF-out and a coaxial S/PDIF-out port, the debug LED, the clear CMOS button, a Firewire port, six USB 2.0 ports, a external SATA port, and the LAN jack.