EVGA is first out of the blocks with NVIDIA's new motherboard.
Let’s get this over and done with. The 680i is the 590 for Intel with a new northbridge, C55. It has support for 1333MHz FSB and 1200MHz DDR2 RAM, so is at least a little futureproof. The MCP55 still sits as the southbridge – there’s been no revision here. Seeing as there’s only one 590 for Intel available that we know of, this is not such a bad thing. NVIDIA is now in the motherboard making business courtesy of Foxconn, so you’ll find this month’s EVGA board is simply a rebranding of the reference board – as will be the XFX, BFG, ECS and Biostar equivalents. These are pretty much guaranteed to be the mostly the same, the differences lying in the supporting packages and extras. Fortunately it’s not such a bad thing, as NVIDIA’s board is really quite good. ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ABIT and DFI will be making their own boards, and hence will likely fiddle a bit with layout, introduce their own quirks and include their own BIOS. The C55 brings with it the overclocking goods – particularly asynchronous memory overclocking and divider ratios, so those with overclocking-unfriendly RAM can still squeeze more out of their CPU. Interestingly the 680i would POST with our Corsair PC2-6400 set to 1T and would happily enter Windows – although this inevitably caused instability when we booted up ye olde faithful Stress Prime 2004. Still, this shows promise in the uncertain DDR2 world. While the options are nothing on the crazy-arse DFI RAM tweaking possibilities, there’s plenty here for the sane human to fiddle with. The BIOS is of course the very sensible and well-thought out NVIDIA BIOS, something that can’t receive enough praise and we hope catches on a lot better than it did last time. The board layout is also magnificent – distance between the two PCI-E x16 slots has been increased hugely, and yet NVIDIA has still managed to fit in two PCIs and PCI-E x1 slots. Sure you’ll lose one of each if you have dual slot coolers in SLI, but that’s a considerably better balance than most. Two of the six SATA ports are mounted parallel with the board – the little black knob to the right of the black FDD connector – to avoid any potential add-in card conflicts, and the CMOS reset jumper is situated at the bottom of the board with an excellent extended tag on the jumper, in an easy to reach place. Buttons are provided for on/off and reset, a POST diagnostic digital display is there, and in general the 680i sports very smart positioning. The only weak points we could find is the battery is very difficult to remove, the capacitors aren’t solid and a heatsink could have been placed underneath the CPU/northbridge area, as C55 gets bloody hot. Admittedly there is an included fan that can be added to the northbridge’s topside passive sink, however, we’d like to stave off any noise for as long as possible. Things are good on the software side too. Guiltily, NVIDIA’s nTune utility is now so good we found ourselves tweaking options and updating the BIOS through it. It felt dirty to do the hardcore stuff through Windows, yet at the same time immensely satisfying. Kind of like eating kebabs at 2am. We managed to get our Core 2 Duo X6800 running stably at 3.7GHz, with only a little tweaking to the voltages. That’s only slightly faster than the Gigabyte 965P-DQ6, and to be honest is probably representative of the ceiling of the X6800 more than the overclocking ability of the board. The 680i is a brilliant board. It easily matches Intel’s 965P in the overclocking stakes and for SLI users you have no other sane choice. Grab it now.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012