Conclusion

NVIDIA’s got another homerun product on their hands with the nForce 680i chipset. While it’s an evolutionary progression from the nForce 590 SLI, NVIDIA has definitely delivered a revolutionary product with nForce 680i.

Not only did nForce 680i deliver better performance than Intel’s P965 and 975X chipsets in our gaming performance tests, memory testing with Everest indicates that that the tweaks NVIDIA has implemented in the nForce 680i’s memory controller is definitely an improvement over Intel’s chipset offerings as well.

What’s really got our attention though is the overclocking prowess NVIDIA has built into nForce 680i. Whereas NVIDIA’s previous Intel chipsets had a hard time breaking beyond 370MHz FSB, we hit bus speeds of 451MHz with our EVGA nForce 680i motherboard, and other online reports are just as robust – it clearly looks like NVIDIA has delivered on their claims of 1333MHz+ FSB speeds with the new chipset. And with 1200MHz SLI memory support also built-in to the chipset, the nForce 680i platform is clearly built to appease the performance crowd, nothing from Intel even comes close in comparison.

On top of that, you’ve also got features unique to NVIDIA such as teaming and FirstPacket. With FirstPacket, latency sensitive applications such as VoIP and online gaming will be put ahead in the queue, reducing, or completely eliminating any lag, and preventing dropped connections. Teaming and Failover double the available bandwidth of the network connection on the motherboard, while also providing redundancy, a spare connection that will keep the transfer going if one connection goes down (or if someone trips on a wire). MediaShield is the industry’s easiest way to setup and maintain multiple RAID configurations. NVIDIA also provides a PATA controller built in to the chipset, so motherboard manufacturers don’t have to provide an external storage controller to support DVD drives and IDE hard drives.

And of course, NVIDIA’s nForce SLI chipsets are the only game in town if you want to combine two graphics cards for SLI.

nForce 680i SLI motherboards won’t come cheap though. Right now EVGA’s nForce 680i SLI motherboard sells for about $250+ putting it in the same price range as many 975X Core 2 motherboards. If this is too much for you, NVIDIA and their board partners will be offering nForce 650i and 650i Ultra motherboards shortly. The nForce 650i SLI should replace the nForce 570 SLI chipset in the $150+ price range, with the Ultra selling for a little lower than that. We haven’t had a chance to test a motherboard based on either of these chipsets yet, but if the nForce 680i SLI is any indication, both of these chipsets should be excellent platforms for gamers and enthusiasts on a budget. We just hope motherboard manufacturers don’t water down their boards based on these chipsets too much. We’ll have to wait and see on that one though.

But for the high-end gamer or enthusiast who wants to build the fastest Core 2 system possible and has the budget to do so, it doesn’t get any better than nForce 680i SLI right now. NVIDIA’s got all the features (and then some) that you’d expect from a high-end chipset, and as we just saw with EVGA’s nForce 680i SLI motherboard, the chipset has the performance numbers and overclocking potential to best any other chipset that’s currently available on the market. NVIDIA really has outdone themselves with this one!