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EVGA 680i LT SLI Motherboard Review :: NVIDIA 680i LT SLI Features
Support all current LGA-775 Intel CPUs including Core 2 Extreme (Dual and Quad core) Core 2 Duo and Quad Celeron D, Pentium 4, Pentium D 9xx and Pentium D 8XX CPUs. The 680i LT SLI chipset supports all current LGA-775 CPUs including the Core 2 Extreme and Core 2 Quad CPUs that were recently released by Intel. I was able to use the board with a Core 2 Duo E6700 CPU without issue. As our main testing CPU is the 3.8GHz Pentium 670, the Core 2 Duo CPU was only used to see if it would work on the new motherboard as advertised and it did, without any BIOS updates. One of the issues that many enthusiasts may have with the bigger brother 680i SLI is that generally the price is around the $250 mark. The new 680i LT SLI board is designed for the sub $200 market, making it a better choice for many people not wanting to spend the extra cash on their motherboard or who do not care about the feature differences enough to pay the premium cost of its big brother. The main focus of NVIDIA high-end boards in the last three years has been SLI technology and the 680 SLI LT board comes equipped with two PCI Express x16 slots for SLI mode. The 680i SLI motherboard from EVGA comes with 3 PCI Express x16 slots with one reserved for future use, but the 680i LT SLI board is targeted towards the more mainstream price point and doesn't have the third slot. The third slot is irrelevant to most users in any case and most desktop users have no use for it at all. NVIDIA introduced their MediaShield technology with their first nForce motherboard chipset. The chipset now supports up to 6 SATA ports natively with the ability to have two RAID 1 arrays with 3 drives each or a singular RAID 0 array using all six drives. The nForce 680i chipset also supported six drives in both of those modes, so there is no difference here in that respect. The nForce 680i LT SLI chipset supports SLI-Ready memory with EPP. EPP stands for Enhanced Performance Profile. This memory stores extra information above and beyond what SPD reports in unused data bits. The information stored includes memory voltage and the command rate of the memory. The 680i chipset supports up to 1200MHz mode, the LT chipset supports up to 800MHz memory. This is bit of a hit for the hard-core overclocker, but for those who just want fast and stable; this is an advantageous move from NVIDIA. NVIDIA's FirstPacket technology allows you set priorities on your network traffic. For example a game that requires lower latency to play online successfully will have high priority compared to a download that doesn't necessarily require a low latency. Both can run at the same time with the lower latency application getting priority over the higher latency application. EVGA has equipped this board with a Gigabit Ethernet port, allowing transfer rates of a Gigabit/second. NVIDIA has pioneered many technologies for your network and its security, their Firewall functionality has matured over the last few years and offers many options to customize your gaming environment. The picture at the end here is of Brian DelRizzo and Peter back in 2005 showing off some of the advantages of the NVIDIA chipset at my old place in So-Cal.  Contents:Discuss This Article
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