The 780i system consistently drew 30W more power than the 680i which is more than we expected to see as the two chipsets are so similar.

PCMark Vantage Results

Longer bars are better

So what about the other new feature, the support for 45nm Penryn CPUs? We plugged in a QX9650 and the system wouldn’t start so Asus sent us a Beta BIOS. The system still refused to start with the QX9650 so we tried the full-house QX9770 with 1600MHz FSB and the system was happy to run. Result! Unfortunately, Windows Task Manager only showed one processor core and performance was correspondingly rather poor so it’s safe to say that Asus has some work to do on the BIOS.

PCMark05 Results

Longer bars are better

Related Reviews

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• Mesh Ultimate Q8 Tri-SLI gaming PC
• Shuttle XPC Glamour SN68PTG6
• Asus EN8800GT/HTDP/1G 1GB graphics card
• AMD Phenom 9500 processor
• Nvidia G92-based GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB
• Asus P5E-VM HDMI motherboard
• Intel 'Penryn' Core 2 Extreme QX9770 and X48 chipset
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT graphics chip
• Intel 'Penryn' Core 2 Extreme QX9650
• Nvidia GeForce 7150/nForce 630i integrated chipset

In that light, there seemed little point in spending any time overclocking as the BIOS clearly needs an overhaul. However, you can bet that it will be perfectly possible to overclock your Core 2 CPU and Nvidia graphics because they always do.

Verdict

If you want to run two or three Nvidia graphics cards in SLI with a Penryn CPU then it’s an Nvidia 780i SLI chipset all the way. However, if you don’t want SLI we’d advise you to stick to the tried and trusted Intel path.