Thoughts, awards, where2buy, right2reply
When we reviewed the early nForce 680i SLI boards, we concluded that they offered superb overclockability at a hefty price. We also left the suggestion that, if you're not a big on overclocking, it might be a good idea to wait for the 'lightweight' version of the board.
If you waited patiently, then you should be pleased with the nForce 680i LT SLI.
The EVGA 680i LT SLI, which is designed by NVIDIA, and priced at £129, has proved itself to perform as near to the more expensive model as makes no difference. All that's missing are a couple of bells and whistles that save you around £30. The nForce 650i SLI, slightly less well-featured, sits at around £90, giving NVIDIA coverage at the key price points for premium Intel-based motherboards.
Regrettably, NVIDIA may have gone a touch too far by removing the on-board speaker, making it impossible to troubleshoot the BIOS POST procedure, but the rest of the package is reasonable.
Most people won't notice the missing overclocking features, extra x16 PCIe slot, or the extra Gigabit port. What you probably will notice, though, is the fan noise from the chipset's bridges...
Is it worth £129? The answer is probably yes if you can live with what's been dropped. We, however, would like to see the price pushed down to, say, £110, to fully differentiate this SKU from the cheaper nForce 680i SLI models out there.
Bottom line: the motherboard's underpinnings are sound and the lower price point is just about compensation enough for the lopping off of certain features, although we'd like to see the debug LED make a reappearance.
HEXUS Awards
The EVGA nForce 680i LT SLI passed all of our tests without failure, but its slightly high price, which is in reasonably close proximity to cheaper nForce 680i SLIs', makes it a little too expensive to recommend outright.
EVGA nForce 680i LT SLI
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any of EVGA/NVIDIA's representatives choose to do so, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.HEXUS.related reading
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