Conclusion

Well, at first glance ZOTAC nForce 790i-Supreme mainboard looks like a really excellent product. It deserves our highest score for great accessories bundle, excellent PCB design and extensive functionality, functional and very convenient BIOS. The mainboard overclocks dual-core processors pretty well and demonstrates impressive success with quad-core CPUs overclocking. Its performance is very close to that of the best mainboards on competitor chipsets and power consumption is just a tiny bit higher. Does it mean that we have finally found an ideal mainboard? I don’t think so. Objective reality forces us to dethrone this evident favorite.

It is not those few drawbacks that we found about ZOTAC nForce 790i-Supreme mainboard. Any mainboard has them. The mainboard cannot control the rotation speed of fans with three-pin connectors, doesn’t save the complete BIOS settings profiles. These are small things, but the disabling of Intel’s power-saving technologies during overclocking may be a significant thing for many users and unfortunately, there is no way of solving this problem. However, even if this is not a big issue for you, there remains one more: the board is based on an Nvidia chipset.

Unfortunately, new mainboards on Nvidia nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset inherited a critical issue of their predecessors: they lose and corrupt data. New BIOS updates may seem to have resolved this issue, but isolated incidents still occur, and I doubt you would want to take the risk of becoming the unlucky one, so don’t trust Nvidia based mainboards with your valuable data. It is really puzzling why Nvidia hasn’t yet updated their South Bridges, which contain hard disk drive controllers.

We didn’t manage to track down the FSB Hole, but it did exist. FSB Strap is no longer there, but where did it move – up or down – or maybe it disappeared indeed? No one knows for sure what new processors Intel will roll out considering the changing market situation, but will Nvidia based mainboards support them? We still remember those unfortunate examples. To our regret, Nvidia nForce 790i Ultra SLI cannot be called reliable. And until these negative tendencies are exterminated, mainboards on Nvidia chipsets will not become a real mass product. And I really sympathize with SLI fans who are forced to buy platforms like that. It is a real pity that because of severe chipset issues a lot of users will give up the idea of getting an Nvidia based board. Especially, since ZOTAC nForce 790i-Supreme mainboard is a remarkably successful product.