Review: The Motherboard Of All Overclockers
Built by EVGA, this motherboard comes equipped with a third PCIe slot for graphics expansion- and hardware-based physics support, making it ideal for high-end graphics and system monitoring workstations. The first two PCIe slots run at x16 speeds and the third slot runs at a slower x8, which can be dedicated to run physics and rendering algorithms. The overclocking timing and voltage ranges are highly configurable in the BIOS, including fan control speeds.
Depending on the type of chip installed, users have several options to simply adjust frequencies. The BIOS arrives with advanced features such as a High Precision Event Timer, an Nvidia GPU Ex and LinkBoost.
These features help increase the performance of Nvidia peripherals and graphics applications.
The 680i SLI motherboard was designed for gamers, image processing systems, graphic artists and developers that are building high-performance applications. To achieve high overclocking, Nvidia built the board using more condensed circuitry layers with high tolerance components.
The 680i's layout also has been slightly rearranged to increase airflow and to prevent the CPU heat sink from touching memory heat spreaders. The 680i uses a four-channel memory interface to gain speeds of 1142MHz to 1200MHz out of DDR2 1200MHz memory.
As the result of overclocking, adding two graphics cards and adding four memory modules, the motherboard can run hot. For this, Nvidia includes a clever heat sink with voltage regulators and a heat pipe to cover the SPP and MCP chips. This cooling heat sink design virtually eliminates noise, making it ideal for home theaters.
