The 680i SLI motherboards were launched with a tremendous public relations effort by NVIDIA back in November. There was a lot of hype, speculation, and fanfare surrounding NVIDIA's latest chipset for the Intel market, and it promised an incredible array of features and impressive performance for the enthusiast. At the time of launch we were promised the mid to low range 650i SLI and Ultra chipsets would be shipping shortly to flesh out NVIDIA's Intel portfolio. NVIDIA had plans to truly compete against Intel, VIA, ATI, and SIS in the majority of Intel market sectors within a very short period of time after having some limited success earlier in 2006 with the C19A chipset.However, all of this planning seemed to unravel as the weeks progressed after the 680i launch. It seemed as if NVIDIA's resources were concentrated on fixing issues with the 680i chipset instead of forging ahead with their new product plans. Over the course of the past few months we finally saw the 650i SLI launched in a very reserved manner, followed by the 680i LT launch that offered a cost reduced alternative to the 680i chipset. While these releases offered additional choices in the mid to upper range performance sectors, we still did not know how well or even if NVIDIA would compete in the budget sector.
All of the chipsets offer support for the latest Intel Socket 775 based processors along with official 1333FSB speeds for the upcoming 1333FSB based CPUs. The 650i SLI and 650i Ultra chipsets are based on the same 650i SPP and utilize the
nF430 MCP. The only differentiator between the two is how this SPP/MCP combination is implemented on a board with the 650i SLI offering SLI operation at 8x8 compared to the single x16 slot on the 650i Ultra.Other differences between the chipsets center on the features that the 680i offers that are not available on the 650i. These features include two additional USB 2.0 ports, two additional SATA ports, an additional Gigabit Ethernet port, Dual-Net technology, and EPP memory support. Otherwise, depending upon BIOS tuning, the performance of the chipsets is very similar across a wide range of applications, with overclocking capabilities being slightly more pronounced on the 680i chipset. In our testing we have found that the other chipsets also offer very good overclocking capabilities with SLI performance basically being equal at common resolutions on supported chipsets.
The overclocking aspects of the board are terrific considering the price point and with the asynchronous memory capability you can really push the FSB while retaining budget priced DDR2-800 memory in the system. This is one area where NVIDIA has an advantage over Intel in this price sector as the P965 boards are generally limited to 400FSB and less than stellar memory performance. We typically found that 4-4-4-12 1T or 4-4-3-10 2T timings at DDR2-800 offered a nice balance between memory price considerations and performance on this board.
We feel like the EVGA 650i Ultra offers a high degree of quality, performance. This board is certainly not perfect nor is it designed for everyone but it offers almost the perfect package in an Intel market sector that has not had anything real interesting to talk about for a long time. We are left wondering why NVIDIA chose the silent path to introduce this chipset when it's obvious they really have something interesting to discuss this time around.
