The Techpowerup crew managed to notice that Nvidia has officially launched its nForce 980a SLI reference platform that support latest AMD Phenom II series processors. The new motherboard is live at Nvidia's website, and we expect Nvidia partners to come up with their own motherboards soon.

The motherboard is based on Nvidia's nForce 980a SLI chipset, features an nForce 200 PCI-Express bridge chip and comes with integrated Geforce 8300-class IGP with DVI-D and D-Sub outputs. As an Nvidia platform, it has support for Nvidia's 3-way and Quad-SLI, as well as support for AMD's AM2, AM2+ and AM3 socket processors. The chipset itself can support both DDR2 and DDR3 memory.

The rest of the specs include six angled SATA ports and two more SATA ports near the I/O back plate, two PATA ports, twelve USB ports, support for two Gigabit LAN ports (one used on the reference board), and integrated HD Azalia audio.

As we wrote before, Nvidia's 980a is actually a 780a SLI motherboard with support for AM3 CPUs and DDR3 memory. You can check out the Nvidia 980a SLI product page here.