ASUS L1N64-SLI WS Motherboard

ASUS is the exclusive launch partner for NVIDIA’s nForce 680a SLI chipset. Their nForce 680a SLI motherboard is known as the L1N64-SLI WS and it’s quite an impressive piece of machinery.

Like all of ASUS’ high-end motherboards, the L1N64-SLI WS is entirely passively cooled. You’ll find no active fans on the board’s nForce 680a MCPs or VRM circuitry. Instead ASUS relies on copper-based heat pipes: sitting directly atop the nForce 680a SLI MCPs is a massive copper plate with twin heat pipes connected to it. A copper heatsink with rolled fins helps keep the heat pipes cool.

For powering both CPUs, ASUS has integrated an 8-phase power solution for each FX CPU. Resting above the power circuitry for both CPUs are large copper heatsinks.

For additional cooling, you can mount auxiliary cooling fans to each of the heatsink assemblies. ASUS provides three fans with the motherboard, so one fan for each area.

In between both CPU sockets you’ll find four DIMM slots – two per processor. Again, as we mentioned previously, for optimal performance you’ll want to popular all four DIMMs, or else the chipset will fall back to single-channel mode.


Keeping to the specs of the chipset, ASUS provides four PCI Express graphics slots on the L1N64-SLI WS. The blue slots are the x16 graphics slots, while the black slots are the secondary x8 graphics slots. ASUS provides plenty of room for dual-slot graphics cards like NVIDIA’s GeForce 7900 GTX and 8800 GTS/GTX, in fact ASUS leaves enough room between all the PEG slots for dual slot cards except the bottom x8 slot.

ASUS also equips the L1N64-SLI WS with 12 SATA ports.







The only area where ASUS falls a little short is in the USB and networking department. Out-of-the-box the board only supports up to 10 USBs: four via backplate and six via external USB headers, while the board only ships with two GigE Ethernet ports. You’ll also notice that legacy ports are still provided. We honestly would gladly swap out the PS/2 and parallel ports for a few more USBs on the board’s back plate. For digital audio duties, ASUS does provide both optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs.


With so many features onboard, the L1N64-SLI WS is a little larger than most ATX motherboards and thus uses the extended ATX form factor. Because of this, the motherboard may not fit in some cases. You’ll also notice the area around the CPU socket is rather cramped – we just barely had enough room to get Zalman’s CNPS9500 LED cooler to fit on the motherboard (the heatsink’s fins barely missed brushing up against the memory modules), you’d be hard-pressed to get a larger cooler to fit.


For overclocking, the L1N64-SLI WS offers HyperTransport speeds up to 400MHz in 1MHz increments, and memory speeds of 400, 533, 667, and 800MHz. CPU voltages up to 1.45V are also provided in BIOS and with memory voltages topping out at 2.5V.

The L1N64-SLI WS officially carries an MSRP from ASUS of $349.99. That places it a little higher than today’s high-end Core 2 motherboards, but not by much considering the extra features this board carries. With 4x4 kits starting at $599, this means that you should be able to get AMD’s baseline 4x4 platform for a little less than the price of one quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700, which carries a list price of $999.