NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI Family Motherboards

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NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI Family Motherboards

Written by popescu eugen

Tuesday, 24 July 2007 00:27

The second phase of NVIDIA's two pronged attack on the gaming and enthusiast community today involves a new family of nForce chipsets for both the Intel and AMD platforms. The nForce 600 family of products is spearheaded by the nForce 680i SLI and 680a SLI. Although the two products share a similar naming convention, they are in fact quite different. The nForce 680a SLI will be the initial foundation of AMD's upcoming 4x4 platform. The chipset's heritage originates in NVIDIA's nForce Professional family of products, and its feature-set includes support four DDR2 memory channels (2 per CPU), quad PCI Express graphics slots, 12 SATA ports, and quad Gigabit Ethernet. When it arrives sometime in the near future, we'll be here to give you more of the juicy details. For now though, we're going to focus on the nForce 680i SLI and a couple of the other new members in the 600i family...

In case you haven't caught on by now, the "i" and "a" designations signify which platform the chipsets are designed for - i for Intel, a for AMD, obviously. The flagship member of the nForce 600i family of products, the nForce 680i SLI, is arguably the most feature-rich chipset to hit the Intel platform. With support for true, dual-PCI Express x16 graphics slots, plus a third x16 slot with a x8 electrical connection, 6 SATA ports, 10 USB ports, and dual Gigabit Ethernet, the 680i SLI is clearly targeted at enthusiasts. And adding to the appeal of the 680i SLI is a host of overclocking related tools that give end users a lot of freedom to experiment with different clock frequencies for not only the CPU, but also Memory and PCI Express slots as well. We'll cover the details on the pages ahead, and introduce you to the other members of the 600i family of products.

	NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI	NVIDIA nForce 680i LT SLI	NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI	NVIDIA nForce 650i Ultra
Segment	Extreme Enthusiast SLI	Extreme Performance SLI	Performance SLI	Performance
Socket	Intel Socket 775	Intel Socket 775	Intel Socket 775	Intel Socket 775
CPU	Core 2 Extreme (dual and quad core) Core 2 Quad Core 2 Duo Celeron D Pentium 4 Pentium D 9XX Pentium D 8XX	Core 2 Extreme (dual and quad core) Core 2 Quad Core 2 Duo Celeron D Pentium 4 Pentium D 9XX Pentium D 8XX	Core 2 Extreme (dual and quad core) Core 2 Quad Core 2 Duo Celeron D Pentium 4 Pentium D 9XX Pentium D 8XX	Core 2 Extreme (dual and quad core) Core 2 Quad Core 2 Duo Celeron D Pentium 4 Pentium D 9XX Pentium D 8XX
FSB (MHz)	1333* MHz	1333* MHz	1333* MHz	1333* MHz
Extreme FSB Overclocking	Best	Good	Good	Good
NVIDIA SLI™ Technology	Yes 2 x16	Yes 2 x16	Yes 2 x8	No
Third PCIe Graphics Expansion Slot	Yes	Yes	No	No
SLI-Ready Memory (MHz) with EPP	1200 MHz	800 MHz	N/A	N/A
JEDEC DDR2 Memory (MHz)	800 MHz	800 MHz	800 MHz	800 MHz
**NVIDIA LinkBoost™ technology	No	No	No	No
PCI Express
# Lanes	46 lanes	46 lanes	18 lanes	18 lanes
# Links	9 links	9 links	4 links	3 links
Configuration	16, 16, 8, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1	16, 16, 8, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1	8, 8, 1, 1 or 16, 1, 1	16, 1, 1
SATA/PATA drives	6/2	6/2	4/4	4/4
SATA speed	3Gb/s	3Gb/s	3Gb/s	3Gb/s
RAID	0,1,0+1,5	0,1,0+1,5	0,1,0+1,5	0,1,0+1,5
NVIDIA MediaShield™ Storage Technology	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Native Gigabit Ethernet Connections	2	2	1	1
NVIDIA FirstPacket™ technology	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
NVIDIA DualNet® technology	Yes	Yes	No	No
Teaming	Yes	Yes	No	No
TCP/IP Acceleration	Yes	Yes	No	No
NVIDIA nTune™ Utility	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
USB ports	10	10	8	8
PCI Slots	5	5	5	5
Audio	HDA (Azalia)	HDA (Azalia)	HDA (Azalia)	HDA (Azalia)

* Available on CPUs supporting 1333MHz FSB
**Note: NVIDIA LinkBoost™ technology has been removed as a feature from NVIDIA nForce® 680i SLI

As you can see in the chart above, all of the members of the nForce 600i family of chipsets have a few features in common, like support for nTune and MediaShield, but it's the 680i SLI that's outfitted with the lion's share of capability. The 680i SLI is equipped with 28 more PCI Exress lanes, more USB ports, more SATA ports, and it also supports DualNet, FirstPacket, LinkBoost, and higher-clocked EPP compatible memory.

Each of the chipsets are targeted at a different audience though, and as such they'll hit at different price points. Motherboards based on the nForce 680i SLI chipset will likley sell in the $249 to $299 range, 650i SLI motherboards in the $149 to $199 range, and 650i Ultra boards in the $99 to $149. All of NVIDIA's partners are expected to release motherboards based on the nForce 600i family of chipsets in the coming weeks and months.

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Last Updated on Thursday, 09 July 2009 01:39

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