Introduction

As of late, the focus for us in the industry as far as CPUs and chipsets go is almost everything Intel. Intel has been the biggest player by far; Core 2 has managed to simply trounce AMD. With delays on working Phenom CPUs, it's hard to cover much in the way of AMD.

Finally, we have reason to celebrate. Phenom B3 is out, and as we found out earlier this week, the TLB bug has been fixed, making Phenom a viable CPU for the more value and mainstream oriented PCs that require two or more cores. At its respective price point, Phenom really has the ability to fill this gap.

Now that AMD has a new CPU, what about the platform itself? Well, thanks to the acquisition of ATI graphics, who has managed to make some rather interesting chipsets in their short span into the motherboard chipset market, AMD now has the ability to produce its own chipsets for its CPUs at mass, rather than relying on third party chipset manufacturers. AMD already has three new chipset families with multiple platforms under each of the families in its 7 series chipsets.

NVIDIA is not one to be outdone though; while focusing on the Intel platform, AMD has finally started to produce AMD chipsets again, and while the 680a was supposed to be the big momma for NVIDIA's AMD line-up, it simply didn't sell due to AMD's lacklustre CPU architecture when compared to the Core 2 series.

Today we have the top chipsets from both AMD and NVIDIA, that being the AMD 790FX and the NVIDIA 780a. We will pit these two head-to-head; who has the best chipset? Which one is loaded with more features? We will soon find out.