NVIDIA has been in the chipset business for several years. They have been so successful that many of the older players in the market, SIS, and VIA don’t have a presence in the market except for a small niche. NVIDIA has with the launch of the nForce 2 series been the dominant maker of motherboard chipsets in the AMD market and is trying to do the same in the Intel market.

The nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard from XFX is based upon NVIDIA’s nForce 790i SLI Ultra chipset that is launching today along with the GeForce 9800GX2 video card. XFX decided to use the reference motherboard with a few modifications and it should be interesting to compare the 790i chipset with the older 780i SLI chipset that was released a few short months ago.

Multiple graphics chips on a single PCB have long been a quick, easy way to get higher performance than a single graphics chip on the PCB. 3DFX was one of the first to implement multiple graphics chips on the same board in the consumer arena in the form of the Voodoo 2 setup which had two TMUs and a . The Voodoo 2 lacked important features like Hardware Transform and Lighting, and was generally slower than the competition of the time.

The next graphics card with two GPUs on one card that hit the consumer space was the RageFury Maxx card from ATI. This card had the distinction of being slower than the single card of the time (GeForce 2) and had poor results due to the limitations of Windows 2000 and the lack of Hardware Transformation and Lighting on the GPU. NVIDIA recently lost the performance crown to ATI in the high end of the graphics market with the HD3870X2 blowing away the GeForce 8800GTX card across the board for a lower price point. NVIDIA’s 8800 Ultra ran for an astoundingly long time as the top of the pack in the graphics arena, but today that is all changed with the launch of the new GeForce 9800GX2.