ASRock for some time have been content to release motherboards using older chipsets and not go for high-end features but rather for value and cost cutting measures. Lately though they've also released motherboards geared towards the higher-end and enthusiasts and also motherboards based off of new chipsets. One of these we have to look at is based off Nvidia's new 780a chipset, ASRock's K10N780SLIX3-WiFi.

As you might know Nvidia's 780a chipset is the highest-end chipset they have for AMD's Socket AM2+ platform and also features a number of unique features that Nvidia introduced with this chipset. These include integrated video on a high-end board to allow for Hybrid SLI and Hybrid Power. What Hybrid Power does is allow for the integrated motherboard GPU to take control of the main display and work in-tandem with a discrete GPU. What it does is reduce power consumption dramatically as the discrete GPU is turned off when it isn't needed saving possibly hundreds of watts of power if you're using an SLI setup and high-end graphics card. Currently this only works with the GeForce 9800 GTX and GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards but we hope Nvidia extends this technology to other cards in the future as it is very promising.

To give a quick run over Hybrid SLI it is similar to AMD's CrossfireX technology that allows the integrated graphics card on a motherboard to work with lower-end cards to run in SLI and give more performance for lower-end systems. This works only on the GeForce 8400 and 8500 low-end cards as with a higher end card there isn't much the integrated video onboard the 780a can offer.

The new 780a chipset is also Nvidia's first to use a 65nm manufacturing process and is thus much, much cooler running than previous Nvidia chipsets which is a great bonus. We noticed on both the high-end Asus Striker II and this ASRock that the heatpipe was much smaller but did it's job perfectly with no need for more cooling. We also increased the HyperTransport link to a hefty 2.45GHz with ease. The other main chip of the 780a is the nForce 200 which handles PCI-E 2.0 support and provides 32 lanes of bandwidth for 16x PCI-Express support and also for triple SLI support and 8x PCI-E bandwidth for three graphics cards. Of course only the 9800 GTX and 8900 GTX support triple SLI but the ASRock maintains that support. One relic which we don't like much but helps them save money is the return of the paddle card selector to choose triple SLI.

Don't think that because ASRock took out integrated video support on the 780a that they skimped on the rest of the features. As mentioned the motherboard still supports triple SLI, a hallmark of the 780 chipset series, as well as DDR2 1066 memory, 6 Serial ATA II 3.0 Gb/s connectors, support for RAID, an external eSATA II connector, one Gigabit LAN, a firewire connector on board and support for another on the back panel, it includes a Wi-Fi/E header, six USB 2.0 ports, 7.1 HD audio content with DTS support as well as optical SPDIF output. Wi-Fi support seems to be a new trend for ASRock on all of their new motherboards. The ASRock K10N780SLIX3 motherboard definitely is full of features and all the connectors you could need. This definitely isn't the level of support you'd see on a value board and not only that it includes Wi-Fi support which is still fairly uncommon on most motherboards.

Another feature ASRock is now touting usually seen on higher-end motherboards are all solid capacitors for the motherboard. This should increase the lifespan of the motherboard, how reliable it is, and give a more stable overclock.