One big change that comes down the pipeline from NVIDIA is the fact that for now on all aspects of the motherboard will be handled by NVIDIA, including the BIOS, which is a tactical and strategic move that will undoubtedly benefit them in the long run. The Phoenix BIOS included on this board was very easy to navigate through and offered many options for overclocking old-school style through manipulation of the system bus, memory timings and voltage. Even though the memory only officially supports 800MHz, there is enough headroom for very decent overclocking to be found on this EVGA 680i LT motherboard. Results for overclocking within the BIOS were at about 10% using stock cooling and very little over voltage to the system. This motherboard was designed with overclocking in mind and even though it is geared for the mainstream buyer it still offers the functionality that enthusiasts love.
Using NVIDIA nTune we were surprised to find that the CPU could be overclocked to almost 14% without any instability in the system. I was pretty surprised at how well the nTune program worked on this board as in all fairness many times it is more of a gauge for overclocking than an actual hard overclock from the BIOS. For the record we tried the same CPU, memory and cooling in both Windows XP and Vista in our overclocking experiments. Quite frankly, Vista failed even the simplest of Overclocking attempts and in my opinion an OS not really ready for prime time, even though the marketing geniuses at Microsoft feel it's the OS of the new age. Windows XP is still going to be our choice of a test platform OS, With better cooling and more time I am sure more aggressive overclocking settings could be attained. Overall I think the new EVGA 680i LT is a very user friendly board as far as the BIOS and overclocking is concerned with no negative aspects other than the 800MHz limitations of official memory support. When the memory is ran in SLI mode it actually runs at 1200MHz anyways.
BIOS Screenshots
