XFX 680iLT SLI

The very generous Craig Simms gives 680i another try.

The 680i chipset has two Achilles heels. Crippling both heels usually brings someone down, but in this case it only made it limp slightly compared to the 965 boards – the rest of its muscles so to speak more than good enough to hold it up.

The weaknesses in question are a northbridge that tends to overheat far too easily, and its extreme price – both of these have now been rectified with the 680i LT.

In a nutshell the differences are: A green board instead of black; the power on and reset buttons have been removed; SLI memory over 800MHz is not supported (though of course manual clocking works); a removed PCI-E x8 slot, a bank containing two USB ports and one Ethernet has been removed; and the most obvious – both north and southbridges are now actively cooled. While the southbridge fan is fine audio-wise considering its size, the northbridge possesses the most vociferous fan we’ve heard in quite some time, aurally assaulting our delicate eardrums. Tweakers in search of silence will want to replace it, stat.

Otherwise this is for all intents and purposes the same board as the original 680i, right down to the bad placement of the front headers and the insane sizes of some of the capacitors surrounding the socket. XFX could learn a thing or two from GIGABYTE in this regard.

On the software side nTune is still as broken as it’s ever been since the BIOS updates for SATA corruption were issued, making it useless – we figure NVIDIA is a little busy trying to get decent Vista drivers running for its GPUs.

Speaking of BIOS updates – XFX’s site simply doesn’t have them, and is highly difficult to navigate in terms of its support options. Slightly worrying. EVGA offers them in EXE format, but this requires you to have a floppy drive. As both boards are essentially rebadges of NVIDIA-made, Foxconn-manufactured products we figured the BIOS would be interchangeable. Hitting the EVGA forums we were able to find an extracted BIN file for our update of choice, and rebooted into DOS courtesy of the Ultimate Boot CD, flash drive in hand and ready to, er, flash.

Sadly, it seems XFX has tagged its BIOS, meaning the EVGA flash won’t work. Vexing. We’d just have to overclock with the default BIOS.

Fitting it out with the requisite X6800, 2GB of OCZ Flex XLC 9200 RAM, Western Digital Raptor and 8800 GTX, we got down to the dirty business.

Interestingly adding voltages manually didn’t gel well with this board – we got more out of it by setting the voltages to ‘auto’, managing a maximum FSB overclock of 450MHz, rock solid. We’re quite sure the board is capable of more, but it just wouldn’t boot at a higher frequency. This is around 40MHz lower than we would have hoped.

As you can see below, the stock performance is spot on with that of the 680i, making the LT a much better proposition for those who want to get into SLI for a little cheaper. Mind you ASUS’ P5N32-E SLI Plus, the hybrid 650i/570 board sells for a bit cheaper again, adds back in the PCI-E 8x, Ethernet port and heatpipes and unlike the 650i offers dual PCI-E 16x – so if you’re not going to overclock much it might be worth going down this path. If SLI is not important, then grab a 965 board, as they tend to be better overclockers, cheaper and dare we say it, slightly better built.

The 680iLT is a good attempt by NVIDIA to try and lower the cost of its flagship mainboard product, but it’s still not enough, and XFX really needs to work on its BIOS support if it wants to play in the motherboard game.

	EVGA nForce 680i SLI	XFX 680iLT SLI
Sandra Processor Artihmetic Dhrystone (MIPS)	27,100	27,174
Sandra Processor Arithmetic Whetstone (MFLOPS)	18,593	15,575
Sandra Memory Bandwidth INT (MB/s)	5,571	5,566
Sandra Memory Bandwidth Float (MB/s)	5,637	5,628
3DMark06	10,818	10,819