It turns out that the "new" Nvidia 780i chipset might not be all that it's cracked up to be and it looks like Nvidia has once again "recycled" and old chipset by adding a PCI Express controller to the mix.

This is something Nvidia has already done in the past and not an unfamiliar path for the company to take. The source is yet again Expreview and they've got a picture of the board without a heatsink on it and you can clearly see the two parts that makes up the 780i chipset.

So it turns out that the BR04 chipset we reported about earlier isn't the actual 780i chipset at all, but rather a PCI Express controller that adds additional lanes to the ones in the 680i to make three-way SLI possible with three x16 PCIe slots.

The BR04 chip is meant to have PCI Express 2.0 support and it might replace the PCI Express controller part entierly inside the 680i. Make what you want of it, but don't expect to gain any real benefits from the "new" 780i chipset, you'll have to wait for the next generation product from Nvidia before this happens.

You can find the original story here in Chinese.