NVIDIA nForce 600i is the successor to NVIDIA’s nForce 500 series, which was the first chipset series from NVIDIA to support Core 2 Duo. Even if the nForce 500 series for AMD’s platform has been well received the Intel equivalent had a much tougher time and, among others, DFI stopped the development of NF590 Intel SLI board simple because the chipset didn’t meet its demands. NVIDIA has been working hard on creating a competitive platform for the Core 2 Duo market and this is not the least because of the positive rumors which have been going around about ATI’s RD600 chipset. The result we see today is the nForce 600i series.
At the same time as NVIDIA launched its new graphics card series GeForce 8800 it also released new chipsets for Intel’s processor platform. nForce 680i SLI is the flagship of the series while nForce 650i SLI and nForce 650i Ultra are more mid-range and low-end. nForce 680i SLI has some similarities with its predecessor when you look at the list of features, but NVIDIA has also added a lot of new goodies.
First of all it doesn’t just have a genuine PCI-E x16 SLI solution, it also has a third PCI-E x16 slot. The third slot is located between the two main slots and comes with only PCI-E x8 bandwidth. But the interesting about this port is its use, namely for a third GPU which will handle physics acceleration with games. If you want, you can still use all three cards as usual and get support for up to 6 separate monitors.
EVGA 122-CK-NF68-AR
other than that it has spent a lot of time and energy on improving the circuit’s overclocking potential and it officially supports 1333MHz FSB processor when they arrive. The first reviews of the nForce 600i series has now appeared and it seems that NVIDIA has done a really good job with its new motherboard chipsets, the overclocking potential seems to be just as impressive as with its new graphics card.
“The overclock results are not a mistake. We managed to reach right at 4.0GHz with an X6800 at 1.575V. This represented the standard 11x ratio at a 1452 FSB. Even more spectacular was the reduced multiplier overclocking, where we reached a 2100 FSB (525 base) at a 7X multiplier AT DEFAULT VOLTAGE”. – Anandtech
NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI reviews
:: TechReport :: Anandtech :: VR-Zone ::
