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Approximately four months ago, we took a look at the ASUS M4N82 Deluxe motherboard, featuring NVIDIA's 'new' 980a chipset. I was really excited about it since it would allow me to run NVIDIA graphics solutions in SLI configuration, along with the Phenom IIs. Although it left me wanting more, I had concluded that the 780a is still very strong chipset that allows the Phenom IIs to show all of their horsepower. I did recommend the ASUS M4N82 Deluxe to people wanting to run a Phenom II along with an SLI graphics-card configuration, but I knew it could have been better. The main things I would have liked to see on it were DDR3 memory slots instead of DDR2, a better HT reference clock overclocking and video outputs for the IGP which was pretty much wasted except in the case of an Hybrid SLI setup.

Not so long ago, I heard about the MSI NF980-G65, sporting the same chipset. I was immediately interested in it, to see if it was better than ASUS' solution. In fact, the NF980-G65 and its little brother the NF750-G55 are the first AMD motherboards to sport DDR3 slots and to be officially SLI ready. I say officially, because today, it can be achieved on a big range of motherboards via some hack; I had previously talked about this matter when it made its apparition. However, a few days ago, I learned that this hack is now more documented and thoroughly explained. It can successfully be achieved on a wide range of motherboards and chipsets, including the AMD ones, as I had wished. Although I did not take the time yet to test it myself, this hack somewhat invalidates the excitation I had about the M4N82 running SLI along an AMD Phenom II, since it can now be done using the greatly performing 790FX boards.

So now that I am less enthusiastic toward a new AMD SLI board, the MSI NF980-G65 will need to fare much better than the ASUS M4N82 Deluxe at the time I reviewed it. Let's see if it can impress me!

Also, before taking an in-depth look at the board specifications, let's remind us what is the 980a platform. To do that, I recalled the 780a diagram from the ASUS M3N-HT Deluxe review. Just keep in mind that for the 980a, the processor now becomes a Phenom II or Athlon II.

The MCP chip manages both the northbridge and southbridge functions. In the case of the 750a chipset, this brings the platform down to a two-chip solution, being the processor and the 750a itself. But for the 980a chipset, an extra chip is added, which is the NForce 200. Its only purpose is to act as a PCI-E bridge between the chipset and the graphics solution. It doubles the available PCI-E lanes so that a 3x8 configuration can be run.

Specifications

Specifications are courtesy of MSI at http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=prodmbspec&maincat_no=1&cat2_no=&cat3_no=&prod_no=1885