Here at HardwareLogic, color us delighted with the contents of eVGA’s racy looking box! Upon first opening it, we were immediately impressed with the quality and well thought out accoutrements. Black rubberized IDE and SATA cables are your first sight. The IDE cable is rounded, highly flexible and much appreciated over the standard, rigid cables you find in typical offerings. Unlike ASUSs’ SATA cables, whose 90 degree SATA connectors were improperly oriented to fit the motherboard headers, the SATA cables provided here have a 90 degree connector on them that lines up with the mobo SATA headers. There’s three 4-pin molex to SATA power adapters, I/O Shield, 1394 Firewire bracket with one port, USB 2.0 bracket with 4 ports, six SATA cables, one IDE cable, Missing In Action – Floppy drive cable, one each. There’s a quaint Comm2 serial port bracket, North Bridge chipset fan and finally, a rigid, extra wide SLI Bridge connector. A quick call to eVGA provided us with reassurances that a 3.5” drive cable was on its way. There is, as usual, the field manual of motherboard ownership which is thorough, well translated, and informative. There’s an included drivers CD, SATA Raid 3.5” disk and, get this, a Quick Setup Guide. This Quick Setup Guide is of dubious value and gives very little information an enthusiast or first time builder will find useful over the manual

Something the geek in us can quickly appreciate is the sleek, all black PCB. The substantial heat pipe laden North Bridge and South Bridge heat sinks come into your view. Then your eyes are drawn to the fairly large LED Post Code, alpha-numerical display panels which are easily read 10 feet away from the Motherboard. eVGA even had the prowess to include a list of codes in the manual. Good job eVGA! From there you notice the two all black PCI-E 16x slots, two white PCI slots, two black PCI-E x1 slots and finally, the blue PCI-E 8x (electrical) slot in the middle.

A quick note here. While the blue PCI-E slot has mechanical slotting for a full length x16 card, and is touted as such, it is limited electrically, (graphics lanes), to 8x speeds.

When your attention is suddenly focused on the CPU area, there’s a noticeable lack of MOSFET’s around the CPU socket. No, this isn’t a digital PWM board; some of the MOSFETs are hidden under passive heat sinks. There’s plenty of room to maneuver in and around the CPU socket with clearance to the DIMM slots being exceptional. Even though the CPU area may seem crowded on the other three sides by heat sinks, it doesn’t prevent mounting a Zalman CNPS9500 or 9700 cooler. However, there is a minimal amount of modding required as the backplates of these two high-end coolers will interfere with circuits on the back of the board. We anticipate Zalman to introduce a new part number 9500/9700 cooler specifically for the 680i series of boards..

We’ll take a quick moment to point out one of our discrepant findings. While we don’t normally disassemble our motherboards, a grayish substance was spied around the edges of the South Bridge chipset passive heat pipe cooler. Once the whole heat pipe assembly was removed from the motherboard, we discovered an overly zealous thermal interface material application guy, (Is there a Budweiser song in there?), had globbed on the TIM to the point of being simply ludicrous.

After completely cleaning the heat sink assembly, we applied Artic Silver 5 and re-installed it. It’s of particular note that the whole cooling apparatus is made of copper, save for the fins on the NB. While not machined to a mirror finish, we found it level across the contact surfaces and very low in profile for the SB chipset assembly.

Traveling to the southern most reaches of our test subject we find two small, white push buttons. HARK!? Do you hear that? That's the call of common sense and ingenuity! This motherboard has been equipped with a built-in reset and power buttons, which came in handy since the front panel header pins are incorrectly labeled in eVGA’s manual! D'oh! Not only that, but during troubleshooting processes, you’re just a push away from knowing for sure if your motherboard will reset or power up/down. Certainly, the addition of these buttons and the aforementioned LED Error code panels resulted in the exclusion of an IrDA header, CD-IN and AUX-In headers, but this is a concession we’re willing to make for this advanced level of functionality.

As we round up our surveillance of this motherboard, we direct your attention to the back panel I/O ports. Here you see all the normal equipment. 6x USB 2.0 ports, 1x 1394, Optical out, Mic in, line in, dual Gigabit Lan ports and finally, the PS/2 mouse and Keyboard ports.

The eVGA 680i’s Bios is supplied directly, and written, by Nvidia. As always, we’ve updated to the latest applicable BIOS (P20 at the time of this writing), which eVGA’s website links to nVidia to gather. Please note for our testing we used P20 since P21 was released solely to address issues when an 8800 series video card and a Creative SoundBlaster card are used. We have neither of these cards in our test bed today.

The Award BIOS for this Motherboard supports speeds and voltages well outside the norm. nVidia, leaning far forward in the foxhole, has seen fit to equip the BIOS with a plethora of settings, FSB options and voltage options that can seem staggering in their abilities. This is where the meat and potatoes of this new series of motherboards is cooked boys and girls! An enthusiasts’ board? Not hardly. How about the enthusiasts all out assault weapon! All of the settings available to you aren’t included in the scope of this article, so we will high-light the finer points below:

We experienced a couple of small issues, certainly not deal breakers. Having ensconced the E6600 test CPU into its bunker….er…socket, first boot required us to enter the BIOS as the CPU was initially set to a 6* multiplier @ 266x4 = (QDR) 1066 FSB and 1.19V. Our second issue was a bit more serious. In trying to set up a SATA RAID array, we quickly found one of the sore points for this board. Supposedly addressed in the P20 BIOS we were already using, the SATA RAID we tried to use would not initialize at all. Not until we went through an unnecessarily long CMOS clearing, BIOS re-flash to the original BIOS, and then a re-flash back to P20 did we finally find some joy here. This situation, as well as the processor mis-stepping, is a sharp reminder that this chipset is still in its infancy. As nVidia looks to its partners’ consumer input, we should see a rapid deployment of future BIOS revisions. There have been three in the first month after its release alone.

For the initiated, you’ll find all the right settings in their easily navigable places. For the un-initiated, rarely has a motherboard come along that demands your unmitigated attention like this one does. However, being marketed for the “Enthusiast” crowd, it says so on the box and through out the manual, it’s definitely worth your time and effort to learn the BIOS from front to back. The eVGA forums community is largely helpful and a response directly from an eVGA tech isn’t a rare event.

There are adjustments for just about everything on the motherboard except the brightness of the LED error panels. Under the Advanced Chipset menu, you see sub-category’s for System Clocks, FSB & Memory Configuration, CPU configuration and System Voltages. You will also see Load Timing/Voltage set and Save Timing/Voltage set. This Bios allows you to create up to 3 different voltage profiles and save them to the BIOS. Regardless of what you’ve hoped for in a BIOS, even if it is optimistic given the adjustments provided.

nVidia exceeded all expectations when it comes to over clocking with the new 680i chipset. We were able to over clock our E6600 from 1066 to a very respectable 1505 FSB! That’s a FSB difference of 29% and easily places our $300 CPU well beyond the $1000 Extreme Edition territory, albeit at stock speeds. Water-cooling would surely allow for higher speeds although during testing, the temps never got over 52C on air. Not only does nVidia bring about a natural solution for overclocking here, they saw fit to publish a comprehensive, well written guide to overclocking this board, perhaps setting a new precedent we hope to see other motherboard manufacturers follow.

Sisoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic
SiSoft Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) 2007 Professional Edition is a 32 and 64-bit Windows system analyser that includes benchmarking, testing and listing modules. For testing processors we use Sandra's CPU Arithmetic benchmark.

Everest Ultimate Edition 2006
EVEREST Ultimate Edition is system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. For testing processors we use Everest's CPU Photoworxx benchmark.

Cinebench 2003
The tool is set to deliver accurate benchmarks by testing not only a computer's raw processing speed but also all other areas that affect system performance such as OpenGL, multithreading, multiprocessors and Intel's new HT Technology.CINEBENCH includes render tasks that test the performance of up to 16 multiprocessors on the same computer as well as software-only shading tests and OpenGL shading tests on huge numbers of animated polygons that will push any computer to its limits.

Sisoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth
SiSoft Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant)is a 32 and 64-bit Windows system analyser that includes benchmarking, testing and listing modules. For testing memory we use Sandra's Memory Bandwidth benchmark.

Far Cry
The HardwareOC FarCry Benchmark is an easy-to-use tool, that makes Far Cry video card benchmarking fast and easy.
In 2004 Far Cry earned the "Best Game of the Year" award because of its awesome graphics and gameplay. It was the first game with Pixel Shader 3 support, which later became a standard in many other games.
While the user interface is simple, you can actually change more details than you think. With its one-of-a-kind screenshot feature, you can make snaps from the same frame from different views. You can also use OpenGL instead of Direct3D, or turn on HRD and Geometry instancing.

F.E.A.R
F.E.A.R has been said to be a "Graphical Masterpiece". It's use of High-Dynamic-Range-Lighting (HDR), and shadows pushes visual effects to an entirely new level. F.E.A.R is sure to push any hardware to the limits.

Our Recommendation

After having felt cheated by the nVidia's 590-SLI motherboard from ASUS, we can't but help feel like eVGA soothed our savage battle scars by bringing two scantily clad Army nurses to climb into bed hwit us. While the BIOS is definitely a work in progress, there's a lot more polish to its boots than the 590 series ever dreamed of.

If SLI is a necessity for your combat load-out, the new 680i-SLI from eVGA brings a lot to the table. Acquisition costs being so low in comparison to the hugely disappointing ASUS Striker Extreme, which commands a $150-$175 premium over the eVGA board, we can’t see how any serious SLI enthusiast could go into battle without having this motherboard as their primary weapons platform.

Other Reviews of Note

It's always nice to have more than one opinion on a component before you spend your hard earned money. For one, We may see something others missed, or vice versa. As with all reviews published at HardwareLogic, we'll not only give you our recommendation, but also point out some reviews from some other great sites around the web.
HARDOCP
PC Perspective
OCModShop
Motherboards.org