NVIDIA nForce 600i series - Tech preview - nF680i Tech Preview-pg.3
Author: Grga Curkovic
Date: 08 Nov 2006

The reference design of 680i SLI motherboard is very interesting. NVIDIA had in mind all those little things that make enthusiasts happy, but could only be found on a limited amount of motherboards. The chipset is connected to a radiator via heat-pipe, and users can choose whether they want to use passive or active cooling, depending on their overclocking preferences. First, third and fifth slots are PCI-Express 16x slots, and if you use SLI you need to place graphics cards to first and fifth slot. This is a very good solution since it leaves enough empty space for cooling the card in upper (first) slot. As an example of something that enthusiasts appreciate we?ll mention the fact that the board has power-on and reset buttons. What we are interests us must is how it performs, NVIDIA claims that this board is faster than 975X boards in most tests, specially in memory performance segment. However those numbers come from biased labs so we should wait with for unbiased test results before making a verdict on its performance. Once again it seems that NVIDIA has done an excellent job and we are eager to test some of these motherboards.