The first thing that sticks out about this motherboard is the three PCI Express x16 slots on the board. XFX and NVIDIA are supporting Tri-SLI with this motherboard so three slots makes sense. Note that installing a single graphics card in the second or third slot will bring up a message letting you know that the first PCI Express x16 slot is the one to install a single graphics card.

NVIDIA Tri-SLI is only currently available on the GeForce 8800 Ultra and 8800 GTX cards, as they have two connectors for SLI on the top of the PCB. Future cards will likely be released with this feature, as otherwise there would be no reason to have Tri-SLI. The nForce 790i chipset is the first NVIDIA chipset to truly support PCI Express 2.0, with the full 5Gb/second transfer rate available. Earlier NVIDIA chipsets supported 4.5Gb/second via a bridge chip.

The CPU area of the motherboard has plenty of space to use after-market cooling solutions with. The motherboard has a heatpipe and finned heatsink cooling solution surrounding the CPU area that is well designed. There is a row of capacitors on top of the CPU Socket and a row on the right hand side of the Socket. The capacitors are not in the way of installing a heatsink as they are lower than the CPU Socket.

Four 240-pin DIMM Slots are on the board providing access to up to 8GB of DDR3 1066/1333 memory and support for up to 2000MHz SLI-Ready memory with EPP (Enhanced Performance Protoccol) memory. The fastest available DDR3 memory at the moment is DDR3-1800, but this chipset supports DDR3-2000 memory when it becomes available which should be relatively soon.

SATA drives have replaced IDE drives in the hard drive arena. Today, few if any IDE HDDs are sold with the vast majority of them being SATA. XFX has put seven SATA ports on their nForce 790i Ultra SLI board, the maximum that the NVIDIA nForce 790i chipset supports. A legacy IDE port and FDD port round out the drive support on the nForce 790i Ultra SLI board.

XFX has an interesting cooler on the NorthBridge of the nForce 790i Ultra SLI board. The NB is a hot running beast as it reached very high temperatures when not cooled by a fan. The XFX nForce 790i Ultra SLI board has a fan over the NB with a heatpipe leading to the rear heatsink. This should keep this chipset running very cool.

The 24-pin power connector is on the bottom right hand side of the board, meaning cable routing from the PSU is not in the way. The 8-pin power connector is on the top of the board next to the heatsink. This is also a good position as the cable doesn’t interfere with anything. The FP IO on the board is on the far left corner of the board with minimal obstruction a great place as well.

The rear IO of the board has the standard PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, an external SATA port, S/PDIF Out, Coaxial and Digital ports, Firewire port, 6 audio jacks for the onboard audio, and two RJ-45 jacks for the Gigabit LAN. The onboard audio is a Realtek ALC888 solution that is their latest CODEC and offers full support for the High Definition Audio standard.