nVidia 790/780, DDR and Graphics Cards

digitalrogue

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Jul 21, 2008
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This may be a daft question and likely as not I'm proving my ignorance here. For the last 6 years I've been a loyal Mac user and have finally decided to turn back to the dark side. I'd like to say it's because Vista looks almost as pretty as MacOS, but really, it's because you have tastier cookies.

Basically a little confused over compatability of boards, memory and RAM. My questions are these:

I'm looking at either an nForce 780i or a 790i. Is the 790i compatable with DDR2 RAM, or only DDR3?

On the Graphics front, if I get an nVidia motherboard (again, let's use the 780i and 790i for this purpose), can I then plug in - for example - 2x HD4870s in Crossfire, or am I restricted to nVidia GPUs?

Thanks in advance!
 

ajcroteau

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Jun 18, 2008
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I'm not sure about this, but i'm assuming that an NVidia nForce motherboard would always be SLI and unfortunately, if you want CrossFire, you need to buy a crossfire motherboard and vice versa.

I could be wrong but if I were NVidia, I wouldn't support products that I was not selling.

So, in conclusion, I would say do your homework, look into Crossfire and SLI and from there select your motherboard accordingly.
 
The 790i supports DDR2 RAM.

For motherboards, they either support SLI (nForce boards + SkullTrail) or Crossfire (most everything else). All single cards work fine though. Think carefully and long term: if one company puts out a bum GFX line (FX and 2000 series for example), you're stuck. Note: GX2/X2 model cards (3870X2 and 4870X2 ATI, 7950GX2 and 9800GX2 NVIDIA) can run on any board.

CPU wise, Intel is still on top (and no, its either a Q6600 or a Q9450 for you CPU, end discussion).