NVIDIA has been making many moves to dominate their environment and that means making radical changes and taking complete control over their motherboards design and implementation. NVIDIA will be controlling all aspects of the board, including the BIOS, which is a tactical and strategic move that will place them ahead of the game in days to come. The Phoenix BIOS included on this XFX 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 XFX 680i LT motherboard. Results for overclocking within the BIOS were at about 10% using stock air cooling and very little over voltage was done to the system to achieve this. The 680i Lt SLI 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 in their products.
nTune was used first for our overclocking tests and were very surprised to see how well it worked on this board. We were able to achieve an almost 14% gain using NVIDIA's OC tool with our test CPU. We were impressed 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 in any case so there is no reason for worries in this area. With better cooling, and more time this board can be tailored to overclock many CPUs without problem. Overclockers Rejoice!
BIOS Screenshots
