nForce 680a SLI chipset

Running alongside the new CPUs is a new chipset from NVIDIA: the nForce 680a SLI chipset. NVIDIA’s nForce 680a SLI chipset is no lightweight, boasting support for up to 12 SATA 3.0Gb/sec hard drives with NCQ, four Gigabit Ethernet ports, 20 USB 2.0 ports, and supports up to four PCI Express graphics cards. For older IDE drives and optical storage, one Ultra DMA 133/100 controller is also provided.

The chipset supports NVIDIA technologies such as MediaShield, with support for RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, and JBOD (just a bunch of disks) using Serial ATA drives, in fact, one feature that’s been touted is the ability to run up to two RAID 5 arrays. As we mentioned previously, the nForce 680a chipset also supports up to four DDR2 memory channels (2 per CPU).

On the networking side, NVIDIA’s FirstPacket technology is included, providing prioritized networking for apps like gaming and BitTorrent. With quad Gigabit Ethernet support, we were a bit surprised however to hear that the chipset doesn’t support NVIDIA’s teaming technology, which allows the Ethernet ports to be combined as one for increased throughput.

For graphics duties, the nForce 680a SLI chipset supports up to four PCI Express graphics slots. Only two of the slots run at full x16 speeds, the other two slots are x8. With four PCI Express graphics slots onboard, the nForce 680a SLI chipset is ready to support not only SLI, but also NVIDIA’s GPU-based physics solution, or you can use the four graphics slots to connect up to 8 displays.





As you can see in the above diagram, the nForce 680a SLI MCPs are linked to one of the FX processors via an x16 HyperTransport link, while the two CPUs are linked by a x16 coherent HyperTransport link. This configuration allows the system to function when one CPU is installed. Each MCP supports six SATA ports, 10 USB ports, and dual GigE, as well as the PCIe slots. Among the two MCPs, the chipset supports up to 56 PCI Express lanes total.

The beauty of this platform is not only its sheer specs, it’s also forward-looking. AMD boasts that today’s Quad FX platform will be upgradeable to eight cores (two quad-core CPUs) when AMD’s quad-core FX CPUs are released in the second half of 2007.