Memory Performance:

The memory performance of the latest nForce 780i SLI board is unsurprisingly very similar to that of the nForce 680i SLI - in fact there's only a fraction difference in favour of the 780i in read speed, but both write speeds were consistently identical. The Abit IX38 Quad GT on the other hand had a similar write performance but a very poor read speed, even though it was running faster memory timings.



However, Sisoft Sandra XII tells a completely different story in favour of the X38 Abit board where it also points out the increased latency of the Abit but thinks it still has a ~300MB/s performance advantage. Again, both nForce 780i SLI and 680i SLI show virtually identical raw performance results.

Drive Performance:

A 150GB Western Digital Raptor-X (WD1500AHFD) hard drive was used for SATA testing. We recorded the average read speeds in all cases using HD Tach 3.0.1.0's 8MB zone test.


Using a more recent Western Digital Raptor-X hard drive we now see all the boards perform identically in raw write speed performance. Neither nForce 780i SLI or 680i SLI has dedicated eSATA ports on board though, however the nForce 780i SLI does have a BIOS option to convert an internal SATA port to external SATA - however there are no extra ports like on the Abit and nothing provided in the box to convert them.