Nvidia nForce 680i

The Hyper-Performance Platform!

NVIDIA’s holiday-season gift to Intel’s latest breed of processors, the 680i sports small (meaning better) chipset-cooling heatsinks which share a single heatpipe. The inclusion of a hex POST debugger is appreciated, as is the huge gap between the two x16 PCI-Express slots (no more issues with dual-slot coolers).

The 680i sports a new BIOS aimed at the hardcore enthusiast. Voltages from CPU to memory to even the Northbridge and Southbridge can be tweaked, ensuring minimal bottlenecks while overclocking.

LinkBoost—an NVIDIA trademark—automatically overclocks the individual PCI-Express lanes when you SLI with any of the 8 series cards or 7900GTX cards.

There’s a couple of Gigabit LAN ports sporting something called DualNet technology. These ports can actually be clubbed together for twice the theoretical throughput, while the TCP/IP acceleration engine aboard each LAN controller reduces CPU utilisation.

nTune has also been reworked, and now allows changing most BIOS options from Windows itself. This can be a huge advantage for overclockers who are in an all-fired hurry, though the hardcore will still want to fine-tune the neatly laid-out BIOS.

We managed to get our QX 6700 (Core 2 Quad, 2.66 GHz default) to 3.45 GHz at a multiplier of 13 (default 10), without any tweaking… simply awesome! Super Pi 1M calculations took 14 seconds at this speed, and 18 seconds at stock.

For the enthusiast who wants performance at stock and stability under overclocking, the 680i makes for a very a potent package. It’s future-proof, and a rock-solid overclocker as well. If you want the best platform for your new Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad processor, you can’t go wrong here.

Specifications
Intel Socket 775; 1333 MHz FSB; 2x16 SLi; third PCIe Graphics Expansion Slot; supports DDR2 800 MHz (SLI-Ready memory with EPP: 1200 MHz); 46 PCIe lanes and 9 links; 6xSATA II; 2xPATA; RAID: 0,1,0+1,5; Dual Gigabit Ethernet; 10xUSB 2.0; 5xPCI; HAD (Azalia) audio