Geforce 9800 GTX

With the arrival of the Geforce 9800 GTX, Nvidia hopes to have a somewhat accessible point (at least compared to the aging 8800 GTX/Ultra, which has unacceptable TDP's due to their old 90nm-based GPU) of entry for the "Three-Way SLI" technology introduced with the nForce 680i SLI/780i SLI.
As the Intel X48 high end core logic clearly comes to the market later than expected (bearing "Crossfire X" support), Nvidia needed a quick and easy solution to turn up the appeal of their next top of the line chipset, the (almost) all new nForce 790i SLI/Ultra SLI for high bandwidth, low voltage DDR3 memory technology.
I say "almost", because, even though the Northbridge is in fact completely new, and now integrates PCI-Express 2.0 on-chip (besides switching from DDR2 to DDR3), the Southbridge component is still the 2 year old nForce 590/570 SLI for AMD systems (here relegated to I/O hub only).
Now, i'm not against using it per se (it still has plenty to offer as a Southbridge, from 6 SATA 3Gb/s ports with RAID 5, to HD Audio, integrated Gigabit Ethernet and IDE/ATA, USB 2.0, etc), given the fact that it's main purpose is to provide 16 lanes of PCI-Express to the third full-length slot -which gives it an edge over their top counterparts from AMD and Intel, which can't go beyond x4 or x8-.



But, even with a new revision on its shoulders, the process tech used (130nm) is a bit long in the tooth, and the fact that a certain DFI motherboard shown at Cebit has an active cooler on top of it (but only a small passive heatsink on the main chip, the 790i SLI) should be somewhat odd for the buyer of such over-the-top parts.

Incidentally, the nForce 790i SLI Northbridge finally marks the transition to 90nm (matching the "P965" and "P35" from Intel, but still behind the soon to be released "P45" -essentially, a 65nm version of "P35").