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eVGA nForce 680i SLI mainboard
Product: 680i SLI motherboard
Manufacturer: eVGA
Price: 249 USD
Info: website
A couple of months ago when the GeForce 8800 was released NVIDIA provided us with an eVGA nForce 680i SLI mainboard for testing purposes as well. Better late than never but I still wanted to do a review on this mainboard as it really is the platform of choice right now if you are into high-end performance, features and most of all tweaking.
We started using this mainboard pretty much the minute we received it which was early November 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.
Today we'll give you the long awaited overview of the nForce 680i mainboard as manufactured by eVGA. We'll slap it with the latest high-end gear and do a couple of overclocking sessions to show where performance is at. The funny thing is that we'll be managing that overclock session with passive water-cooling.
The 680i mainboard is the nForce 590 replacement model, which, on it's end, is a nice improvement over the still wildly popular nForce 4 series. What makes this product series better then? Well a maximum performing chipset guarantees you the best tweaks & overclocks compared to the previous generation chipset, as well as a bucket load of cool features we have seen on the AMD version of the nForce 590 board like "SLI Memory" compatibility, "FirstPacket technology", TCP/IP acceleration and also the option for connecting SATA drives in RAID configurations.
In this review we'll have a brief overview of that technology and obviously the cool and hip features as I just mentioned above. Also we'll have a look at some really cool new Dominator DDR2 memory from Corsair in combination with a rather impressive Core 2 Duo Conroe X6800 processor running at default on a 1066 MHz front side bus.
As stated we'll do something special though and that special factor is that we'll passively water-cool this processor mounted into this NFORCE 680i SLI mainboard to see if we can still overclock it. The last generation and direct competing product for this setup obviously is the AMD version of the NFORCE 590 SLI mainboard equipped with an AMD FX-62 processor. Will this system be able to beat that twice as expensive solution performance wise? We'll have a look for sure.
Next page please.
