It's time to study many photo's from our nForce 780i image gallery, let's have a peek at the mainboard layout.

There it is, the actual nForce 750i SLI FTW mainboard itself, ATX form factor. The PCB looks a lot like the 680i and 780i yet notice the smaller details. A more refined look, the two PCIe 16x slots clearly visible out there in NVIDIA green colors slots and then very noticeable... the new cooling blocks covering the SPP and MCP chipset. A less colorful, more dark design mainboard, I like that.

Here you can observe the read panel I/O. As you can see Serial and Parallel ports are now a thing of the past. From left to right:

• PS/2 mouse & keyboard ports
• FireWire port
• USB 2.0 x2
• SPDIF output optical (love that!)
• Audio ports analog
• gBIT Ethernet NIC
• USB 2.0 x4

This mainboard is aimed at Intel Core processors, this is socket LGA 775 for all that processor goodness. Nice spacious design btw. Lot's of room for any CPU cooler. All the way above the LGA 775 socket to the right, high quality mosfets, heatsinks and barely visible the 8-pin power connector especially for dual & quad core processors.

This is called the "P4" connector. Typically this was a 4-pin connector. Now do not worry if your PSU only has the 4-pin model. It'll work fine and will fit just as well. The newer PSU's however have the new 8-pin model connector which can cram 150 Watts directly to these lovely dual and quad core CPU's.

This is the SPP (Northbridge) chipset cooler. If you plan not to overclock your PC then chances are pretty good you can suffice with passive cooling. I must say the the new passive heatpipe cooling looks just stunning.

Some remarks though, I find the fan to be too noisy, in the BIOS you'll end up giving it a forced RPM of less than 40% to keep it quiet enough. Secondly, when you start to overclock then a serious amount of heat will be blown away from the SPP due to that fan. The downside is that it's actually blowing that heat directly onto the backside of your graphics card, pretty much 100% at the GPU location. That's just not clever.

Rotate the position of the cooling block 45 degrees clockwise and it would have blow that heat towards the rear I/O ports where above it usually is an exhaust fan located.

Here we have the DDR2 DIMM slots for your memory modules. Obviously go dual-channel with two or four modules. 4 x 240-pin DIMM socket Dual Channel DDR2, a maximum of 8GB of DDR2 533/667/800 can be used, we tried 1143 Mhz memory, and after enabling that in the BIOS, it works fine as well.

BTW - make sure that the DIMM colours correspond to achieve dual-channel memory. The position of the DIMM slots is good, the retention clips are not blocking the graphics card and vice versa.