MSI's nForce780i SLI boards pictured. 3SLI and 45nm support

[HEXUS]

MSI's P7N Diamond and Platinum boards will provide three-way SLI and 45nm Penryn support. We take a sneak peak.

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[DeSean]

Unless I am mistaken the cheaper board only has 4 internal SATA ports, which makes it a poor buy for over £120 in my view.

Although not many 780i based boards have been tested yet, I would guess power consumption will be massive, because of the additional circuits required for PCIe2.0 on top of the SLI chipset. This is more important if you agree that the only reason to buy one of these boards over an Intel chipset is to get SLI, which we all know the pros and cons of.

[Tarinder]

MSI is notorious for publishing pictures of boards that aren't finalised.

Taking the nForce 680i SLI as a base, it has six SATA2 ports running off the southbridge. We'd be amazed if MSI didn't use all six on the PCB itself and added another couple of eSATA ports from some add-in controller.