The first and most prominent feature with the 780a chipset is integrated video onboard allowing for what Nvidia calls Hybrid Power and Hybrid SLI. Basically this allows you to save energy as if you're doing day to day tasks such as web browsing of using a word processor it'll shut off completely you're primary graphics in your PCI-Express slot. When you load up a game your main card starts up, thus saving you plenty of power and heat in what the majority users have as downtime. Quite a neat feature but unfortunately we ran into problems with the Crosshair II trying to enable it and were just short on time so we'll have to look into this and other 780a features later. For now let's move onto our review of Asus' Crosshair II Formula 780a motherboard.

ECS (Elitegroup Computer Systems) has been in business since 1987, and they have manufactured quite a few motherboard in those 20+ years to say the least. While they do have boards designed for the computing enthusiast, their products generally offer some of the latest features and specifications at a price point that makes them have greater mainstream appeal. One of their most recent releases, and the subject of this review, definitely follows this trend. The A770M-A (V1.0) motherboard is based on the AMD 770 chipset, and is designed to support the latest AMD AM2+ CPUs. Some of the key features of this new board include support for AMD Phenom processors, HyperTransport 3.0, PCI Express Generation 2, and a few configurations of RAID.