Albatron 680i SLI
Product: mainboard
Manufacturer: Albatron
Price: 229 USD

Last week here at Guru3D.com, we already showed you that if you want good performance with a regular PC; it really doesn't have to be expensive. A sub-100 USD mainboard can be very sufficient to run all your components like a charm.

But what if you are more of a Guru kind of regular? Chances are that you seek the best available performance, the best tweaking options for an even better overclock. Well, chances are rather big that you'll end up with either an Intel P975 mainboard, or if you have SLI functionality in the back of your mind; an nForce 680 based mainboard.

With that in mind, Albatron recently jumped the NVIDIA mainboard 600 series segment. They now offer NVIDIA mainboards from the popular 600 series including the 650i Ultra, 680i LT SLI and the board we'll review today, the 680i SLI.

The Albatron nForce based 680i SLI has ever since it's release been an amazing mainboard series. It's simple, if you want to overclock your PC, chances are large that you at the very least are opting for a 680i mainboard with Core 2 Duo processor and some good memory. Here at Guru3D we started using this mainboard series pretty much the minute we received it, which was early November 2006 and ever since it has become the #1 mainboard for testing graphics cards. Intensely stable, hefty tweaking features and massive performance - these are the three things I immediately think about when we talk about the 680i mainboards. Obviously, it's the sum of all things. You have to have the high-end processor, PSU, graphics card and memory yet with these three ingredients you can achieve rather spectacular miracles.

These 680i mainboards are expensive though, and by stripping some cables and additional USB brackets, Albatron decided to ease the pain a tad by lowering the price a little bit; not much though. They introduced this high-end SLI mainboard at a little more affordable level. The mainboard itself is a 'designed by NVIDIA product' ... and that means pretty much any board from any manufacturer is 100% the same. So that definitely is promising.

So if you purchase the right combination of components you can make your PC fly, let's try and make that happen, shall we ?