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NVIDIA is also trying to be green(er).

Now an SLI rig can shut off some of those monstrous power hungry GPU's when you are just surfing the net. Excellent idea.

Even more savings can be obtained by only using the on-board IGP video, and totally shutting off the add-on GPU's.

Now that we've digested the slides,let's quickly go through NVIDIA's marketing bullets for the 780a:

• Designed for NVIDIA's SLI technology
• HybridPower Technology
• GeForce Boost
• ESA support
• NVIDIA Control Panel
• PCIe 2.0 Support
• MediaShield Storage
• nForce Networking
• Native Gigabit
• FirstPacket technology
• High Definition Audio
• PureVideo

Please note that basically all of this applies to the lower end 750a and 730a as noted on the last page.

The NVIDIA nForce 780a chipset was designed from the ground up to support high-end NVIDIA GPU's in up to three way SLI configuration, which for certain applications, can approach a factor of 2.8x speedup over a single GPU according to NVIDIA.

HybridPower is actually a neat concept - let's face it, running the Windows desktop, even Aero, does NOT need a massive GPU these days. With HybridPower, NVIDIA will use the integrated graphics on the motherboard for Windows, and simply turn off the power hungry GPU's in the PCIe slots - this could potentially save hundreds of watts while surfing the net or other desktop uses.

GeForce Boost as nearly as I can tell is simply some form of minimal automatic overclocking of the PCIe bus, and ESA support allows ESA aware applications to get more information about motherboard and power supply voltages and temperatures (assumign ESA capable power supplies). The NVIDIA control panel allows a fair bit of tweaking of the GPU's installed in the system, and lets you tweak the GPU to your heart's content.

PCIe 2.0 support doubles the bandwidth of each PCIe lane compared to PCIe 1.0 - a good thing, as in SLI systems now a PCIe 2.0 8x slot will have the same bandwidth as a previous PCIe 1.0 16 slot - mind you, SLI does not seem to need a lot of PCIe bandwidth due no doubt to the SLI connectors providing direct connection between the GPU's.

MediaShield is basically NVIDIA's RAID solution, supporting RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5 on up to six SATA2 drives. The 780a chipset also supports native Gigabit Ethernet, and the driver supports NVIDIA's "FirstPacket" TCP/IP scheduling by type of traffic - basically a way of setting quality of service for VOIP, downloading, surfing and streaming video.

The 780a also supports High Definition Audio with up to eight channels of 192KHz sampling rate 32 bit sound - frankly, its an overkill, but hey, it will sound good -- and the PureVido HD technology in the integrated graphics should assure smooth HD playback; and it even includes the required evil HDCP chip.

Well, after examining the material made available to me by NVIDIA, it seems pretty clear that all the 700 series chips are actually based on the same die.

Okay, now back to looking at the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe...