Nvidia’s  forte has always been on the graphics side of the business, and truth be told, while it has had a lot of hits with its chipset releases, such as the 680i and the more recent 780i, Nvidia cannot achieve the same market coverage as other competitors with their larger pool of resources.

Good thing Nvidia is peopled by some smart cookies who know what the market needs and wants, and knows how to apply their excellent products to fill the need. The 750a SLI is an offshoot of their popular 780a chipset, or more precisely is a direct downgrade of the high-end chipset. The 750a is exactly the same MCP northbridge as the 780a, only minus the nf200 chip with the additional PCI-E lanes on board, plus some additional refinements. So what Nvidia fields in this mainstream space for people who do not actually need more than 16 lanes of PCI-E bandwidth is a dual PCI-E2.0 8x motherboard capable of dual-card SLI with the same performance of older PCI-E 1.0 16x (per slot) motherboards. Buyers get nearly all of the features of its bigger brother, while snagging a much lower price along the way.

                                             The 4-phase power for the CPU and dual channel 1066MHz capable memory slots.

The 750a boasts of nearly the same features as the 780a, namely GeForce 8300-class, DirectX 10-compliant integrated graphics with HD video decoding and HybridPower capabilities. Support for Shader Model 4.0 and an HDMI output announces this on-board graphic’s high definition playback prowess, while HybridPower intelligently discerns when discrete graphics is unneeded and accordingly shuts it down. Support for SLI (instead of three-way SLI as on the 780a) rounds out the graphics package. A Phenom-ready socket with HT3 link, six 300MB/s Serial ATA RAID ports, 10 USB ports (12 on the 780a), and the same Gigabit Ethernet controller underline the 750a’s roots.

                                             SATA connectors are flanked by on-board power, reset and CMOS clear buttons.

The board itself is physically similar in looks and layout to an XFX 780a motherboard, with a black PCB, green connectors, a good layout peppered with well-placed power and data connections, and a select few extras to perk up the enthusiasts, such as on-board LED error poster, on-board buttons for power, reset, and CMOS clear, even dual, removable BIOS chips – for the rare occasion that a bios update or overclocking attempt goes wrong. IDE, SATA, USB and power connectors are arrayed parallel to the board’s edge, making for easy connections. Rear panel is chock-full, especially at this price point, with provisions for FireWire, optical and coaxial. DVI, VGA, an E-SATA connector, and four USB slots and the sound plugs bracketing the whole thing.

                                             SLI PCI-E slots. Note the manual jumper blocks and the primary (green) PCI-E slot.

The SLI implementation is somewhat of a throwback, with four large jumpers that must be moved to enable SLI operaion. Another quirk is that the primary PCI-E graphics slot is actually the 2^nd slot down the motherboard instead of the topmost one as is traditional. Lastly, a seemingly lost SATA connector was spotted right behind the rear panel of the motherboard, presumable for providing connectivity to the external SATA connector. These quirks does not detract from the inherent performance of the 780/750a MCP, seeing as they are essentially the same chip – buying the 750a for around P7000 nets nearly the same feature set (only minus some PCI lanes which will not be missed by most users anyways) for far less than the asking price of a 780a-based motherboard.

                                             Rear panel connectivity is very good; comparable to most high-end boards.

With the award-winning features of a more expensive chipset, such as flexible graphics options and a nearly complete connectivity feature set, combined with the fact that most enthusiasts with modest means will never even consider three-way SLI or the most expensive (Intel) processors, the XFX 750a SLI motherboard fills a requirement both for Nvidia and for consumers with its balance of price and performance.