The i3DSpeed, a project of iXBT.com and Digit-Life.com, is dedicated to informing you about performance of a large number of graphics cards under Windows XP and Vista. Traditionally, we offer you summaries of performance of the popular graphics cards, and also inform you about the best price/performance deals in the market.

AMD 780G is a good chipset for entertainment center and full-size PC motherboards. But it would have been strange not to see this chipset in a classic simple microATX board. Biostar designed such a product, including it into their elite T-Series instead of a noname family. Let's see what has been done to justify this high status.

While renaming products to GeForce 9xxx, NVIDIA launched another graphics card based on G92 -- GeForce 9800 GTX. It's the most powerful single-GPU graphics card, designed to replace GeForce 8800 GTX (and probably GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB in the nearest future). However, at this moment GeForce 9800 GTX stands in between GeForce 9800 GX2 and GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB.

Time has come for the long-awaited announcement of the dual-GPU card NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2, which unites the power of two G92 GPUs into a single solution. Unlike AMD, with its multi-GPU CrossFire solutions for the top price range, NVIDIA does not seem to give up the single-GPU future for its graphics cards. The card we shall review today should outperform AMD RADEON HD 3870 X2, which was the fastest card since this January.

Having nothing against dual-graphics card machines, but not going to install the second card immediately, an ordinary user may prefer a motherboard with two graphics card slot. At that, an important prerequisite for a budget CrossFire/SLI Ready system is not to overpay for the dual graphics support. Motherboard manufacturers are aware of these requirements, and offer inexpensive dual-graphics products. These are rarely based on modern chipsets, but there are some exceptions. Today, for example, we are to review such a motherboard from MSI.

The MARS motherboard is currently the only product in the Quantum Force series, which Foxconn announced for gamers and overclockers. And we are nearly 100% sure that it is an overhauled Foxconn P35A-S.

We have already tested motherboards on the AMD 790FX chipset from Gigabyte and MSI. In both cases we have found luxurious sets of peripheral interfaces and tangles of heat pipes in the chipset cooling system. Actually we've seen it all in previous models based on the top-end chipsets. Just the quad PCI Express x16 ports have become a usual thing with the launch of this core logic.