EVGA nForce 680i motherboard

During our AM2 Chipset Shootout, Foxconn manufactured and sold an exact replica of NVIDIA’s reference motherboard for the nForce 590 SLI launch. This time, eVGA takes the honors. They follow NVIDIA’s exact reference board design, which isn’t necessarily bad. Like the previous time, this motherboard turned out almost perfect.




In the first photo we see four 240 pin DDR2 slots. They are all color-coded to show the two memory channels. Below them, we see the 24pin ATX2.0 power connector. Next to that is the lone PATA connector. Above it is a Molex connector for adding extra power to the motherboard and the front panel connectors.

This is the only flaw we found on the layout of this board. Front panel connectors are usually found toward the bottom right corner of the motherboard. This time, they are placed at the middle right edge of the motherboard. This placement was in no way obtrusive, but it was kind of strange.

In the next photo, you see all of the expansion slots. There are 3 PEG slots, 2 PCI slots and 2 PCI Express x1 slots. As we mentioned before, there is an extra PEG slot for an extra video card which can be used to drive additional displays and/or NVIDIA’s upcoming physics solution utilizing Havok FX. If you use video cards that utilize dual slot coolers, expect to lose a PCI Express x1 slot and another PCI slot if you enable SLI. Lastly you can also see a red colored 1394 Firewire header.


Here is the nVidia 680i SPP and its massive passively cooled heatsink. A heatpipe brings heat from the MCP to the heatsink as well, so it gets quite hot under load, especially when overclocking. EVGA mitigates this by including an optional fan which can be attached to the base of the heatsink. The photo on the right shows the CPU socket area. As you can see, the MOSFETS are cooled, but the PWM (Power Management, labeled R50) blocks are left uncooled. You can also see the EPS 8pin connector. It is compatible with standard 4pin connectors as well.


These two photos show the bottom corner of the motherboard and the rear ports. The motherboard has a Winbond sensor chip that reports fan speeds and temperature. Next to it is a pair of diagnostic LEDs which display hex numerals telling the user what’s going with the system. This is a great debugging feature. Right next to the LEDs are two blue USB2.0 headers for powering 4 additional USB ports. Towards the bottom of the photo we see two of the six total SATA2 ports facing 90 degrees, and a floppy connector turned 90 degrees as well. Here we should note that according to NVIDIA, all SATA ports are eSATA ready, although EVGA’s nForce 680i motherboard doesn’t include eSATA support.

The back panel of the EVGA motherboard is fairly standard. Gone are the legacy parallel and serial ports. There are 6 USB2.0, a 1394, and the PS2 ports for connectivity of peripherals. Standard 8-channel audio is included as are the two GigE ports.


Here is the included 40mm fan for optional cooling of the SPP when overclocking.

Overclocking

Overcloking on the nForce 680i is pretty straightforward, but it requires a bit more knowledge than to overclock on an Intel chipset. You must know to lower the HT Multipliers to 3x if your FSB goes above 400. FSB here is multiplied by 4, so in your head you must remember to divide by 4, and then multiply by the CPU Multiplier to get the final CPU speed. The above settings only show the max CPU, not FSB overclock.

One interesting feature NVIDIA’s Intel-based chipsets have supported for some time now is that the memory bus and FSB can run in asynchronous mode. This allows you to run the memory bus and FSB at different speeds. EVGA’s nForce 680i motherboard provides memory speeds of 400MHz-1400MHz in 1MHz increments, this allows end users to really fine tune performance when overclocking.

We got a max of 1804FSB (451FSB) with our EVGA nForce 680i board, which is excellent, and on par with the recently tested Intel motherboards.