Following yesterday's story about Nvidia's 790i board shot making it online, we can now follow up with a picture of Nvidia's 780a board for AMD processors.

They share a few things, such as three x16 PCIe slots and four memory slots, but the 780a board has a very different layout in every sense of the word. For starters, this is a single chipset solution. Well, that's not quite the truth, as with Nvidia's 780i, this board relies on the N200 chipset for PCI Express 2.0, hence the very odd looking chipset cooler. The board also has three PCI slots and a single x1 PCIe slot.

Furthermore, we'd go as far as to say that this board is using a modified version of the GeForce 7050/nForce 630a chipset. The reason why we're saying modified is because this board has some features that the GeForce 7050 doesn't support, SLI being the most aparent one.

You might wonder why Nvidia would do such a thing, but if you look at the rear I/O you can clearly see the DVI and D-sub connectors. This makes us believe that this is the first Hybrid SLI board from Nvidia. Other things that differ are the fact that the 780a has six SATA ports toward the front, as well as one just behind the audio connectors and one above the memory slots.

It also seems to support a total of 12 USB 2.0 ports and six of those are already part of the rear ports. It seems like it only has a single Gigabit Ethernet port, and Nvidia has also kept FireWire as part of the specs. 7.1-channel audio is, of course, part of the package and there seems to be an optical S/PDIF connector on the board, as well.

Make what you want of this picture from iXBT, but it is a strange beast, for sure. We'll have to wait a little bit longer until we find out the real deal here, but it seems as if Nvidia is taking its AMD platform in a new direction.