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- Date:
- Tuesday , November 07, 2006
- Author:
- Morry Teitelman
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
NVIDIA 680i Launch & eVGA's new nForce 680i SLI Mobo
The nForce 680i SLI board is eVGA’s flagship motherboard with support for the Core 2 Duo and Quad that uses NVIDIA’s new chipset. eVGA is NVIDIA’s launch partner for the 680i and the motherboard is available today! Put this one on your short list.
Introduction
While it has not been that long since we saw NVIDIA launch its 500 series motherboard chipset, we never saw it quite come to fruition. There are several reasons for this. One being that we saw some very big changes come about in the chipset industry that changed the landscape when AMD bought ATI. The other reason we never saw too many nForce 500 series motherboards is that all the motherboard builders knew the 600 series was hot on its heels and likely to be more of an advancement from the nForce 400 series…and they are right, at least in terms of enthusiast features.
What follows our introduction page is a [H] Enthusiast motherboard review, not some big 10 page article that tells you about this new chipset. We have come to learn that a chipset is only as good as the motherboard it sits on, and have gotten away from evangelizing great chipsets that have only ended up in retail to be carried on crappy motherboards.
NVIDIA knows that this is the case too, and have taken a huge step in controlling the quality of the motherboards that their chipsets reside on. As with the NVIDIA-based FoxConn motherboard we reviewed on the 590’s launch day, this eVGA board shown to you here is also an NVIDIA reference design. Not only is it reference, NVIDIA had the board built again by FoxConn, and branded specifically for eVGA. Other partners such as BFGTech will carry this exact same motherboard with their own branding on it.
I have been the “motherboard guy” here at HardOCP for 8 years now and I can tell you that I welcome this level of quality and product control exhibited by NVIDIA. If they continue to impress me in the motherboard arena as they have with this eVGA 680i motherboard, it is going to be a very well-liked and sought-after product in the enthusiast community…as it is built specifically for the enthusiast. This thing overclocks like a madman and does it fairly easily as well, while still leaving plenty of room for tweakers to play around in the BIOS looking for every single MHz of power.
Features for the Enthusiast
The nForce 680i that is being launched by NVIDIA today is very similar to the nForce 590 SLI chipset on the surface. In fact they share a long list of advanced features. Here are a series of slides that outline its features. After that, we move onto our review of the motherboard.
