EVGA 680i SLI 775 Mainboard - MBO inspection
Author: Grga Curkovic
Date: 21 Nov 2006

MBO Inspection

After initial inspection it was time to do some testing, and in order to do that we needed to assemble a machine. We decided to go for liquid cooling since we were planning on doing some overclocking as a part of this test. We used our Aquagate and its default CPU block, and that was when we noticed something quite irritating. On the back side of the board, exactly where the CPU lies are three small resistors preventing us from simple installation of the bracket holding the water block on the processor. The same problem will arise if you try to use air coolers with that kind of brackets like Zalman 7700. However, we inserted 7 of our business cards between those resistors and that was enough to mount the cooler. We decided to go for active chipset cooling and installed the provided fan too. If you decide to water cool this board be sure to use that additional fan and provide enough airflow over the PWM area since those transistors tend to get quite hot. Also, if you plan on using water cooling we would suggest that you use additional System fan in so everything's cool and quiet (besides the standard chipset fan). If you use standard air cooler it will provide enough airflow to cool down the PWM area. Layout of this board has already been discussed in our Tech preview, but now that we actually worked with the board we have some first hand experience to share.

The board has 3 physical PCIe x16 slots, but the middle one is x8 electrical. This is quite an improvement comparing to the other available chipsets since non of them (except nForce4 Intel Edition) feature that many PCIe lanes. Apart from those three, there are two PCIe x1 slots and two PCI slots. Working with this board we noticed a small detail, memory slots are far enough from the graphics card so your graphics card is not in the way when you want to change the memory module. We are often faced with this frustrating process of removing the graphics card when we want to change memory modules. Another worthy feature are power-on and reset switches that can be found on this board. This board supports up to 6 SATA and 2 PATA devices in all RAID combinations thanks to the well known NVIDIA?s MediaShield technology. There are 6 USB ports on the back panel and 4 more are supported via brackets. The back panel also features two PS/2 ports, FireWire port, six audio jacks, optical S/PDIF output and 2 Gigabit Ethernet connectors. There are three fan headers apart from the mandatory CPU and chipset ones. This board has the standard 24pin power connector, the additional 8pin one and it requires a molex to work properly.