XFX N780-ISH9 (NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI)
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Date: 08.04.2008 |
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XFX N780-ISH9 Layout and Features
The first thing what catches the eye is the massive system for cooling the chipset and the power converter. In fact, the board uses a small radiator on the PWM and one huge radiator on the chipset. This radiator is in direct contact with the south bridge, north bridge, and the additional nForce 200 bridge. Both the radiators are interlinked with a heat pipe.
Clearly, the heat load upon the main radiator is quite high, so the engineers made it tall enough and provided for the option of installing an additional fan (available in the package bundle).
We should note that positioning of the main components of the motherboard does not create any issues for the assembly operator. In particular, the main 24-pin power connector is installed on the board's bottom edge, with the additional 8-pin connector (the backward compatibility to the PSU with a 4-pin cable has been preserved) - on the right-hand edge:
In fact, there can be found something to find fault with the PCB design: after installation of a full-length PCI-Express video card, the DIMM slots are partly blocked.
Near these slots there is a 4-pin CPU_FAN connector to plug in the processor cooler.
Besides it, there are five more 3-pin connectors: one - near the rear panel, and one more - on the board's bottom edge, and three on the right-hand edge. At the same time, N780-ISH9 determines the rotational speed of all the five (of six) fans and controls the rotational speed of four of them.
Under the north bridge, there are four DIMM slots. The maximum memory capacity makes 8 GB.
To enable the dual-channel mode, the memory modules should be inserted into the slots of the same color. As regards the expansion options, the board uses three PCI Express x16 slots (all with holders) as well as one PCI Express x1 and two PCI slots.
It should be noted that to first and third PCI Express õ16 slots there are 16 PCI-E version 2.0 bus lanes allocated, 16 - to the central (second) PCI Express õ16 slot, albeit of version 1.0.
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