Shintai? Proesterchen? No props from you two?

I wonder how much the power use would drop by turning off the audio, ethernet, raid and firewire?

27W more than the P965 at idle?! That's ludicrous.

Long live the NFurnace!

Where's the ISA slot? I NEED MY ISA SLOT!!!

we wondered if the engineering sample Core 2 Duo E6700 we were using for testing could be the culprit, so we picked up a retail E6300

Thank goodness. TR's C2D mobo overclocking sections were not really worth paying attention to before.

Excuse my ignorance, but...

I've lost track of DDR and QDR etc.. when the FSB on an Intel mobo is reported in the 450-500MHz range as in this example, is the FSB actually clocked at those incredible speeds, or does the 450MHz represent a 2x or 4x multiple of the actual clock frequency?

Likewise with the 1200MHz DDR2 memory overclock - does that mean that the memory lines are actually clocked at 600Mhz? Or 300MHz?

I remember back in the days of the DX2/50, when it was too hard to get mobos to clock over 25MHz. Yet 20 years later we're clocking mobos in the hundreds of MHz - pretty amazing fine-tuning on the transmission line effects or whatever they do to get the boards stable at those speeds.

What I got out of this article was that the new nForce 680i SLI board essentially had the same performance of the nForce 4 SLI x16 board.

Exceptions are the IOMeter - Workstation test and any of the iPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit tests.

I would personally save my money and buy the more mature chipset and save some money.

$260 for the nForce 4 board: http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=19512&vpn=P5N32-SLI%20SE...

$300 for the nForce 680i board: http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=21081&vpn=122-CK-NF68&ma...

But you know, that could just me being practical of all things.

Wow. Wow-wow-wow. This is all the OMFG that the 8800GTX review *didn't* give me. This is just stunning, I want, want, want; MUST HAVE NOW.

I now know what Core 2 mobo Forge has been waiting for. This plus some seriously sick C2D action will get the frag going like nothing else out there.

P.S. Nvidia, please send me one (1) 680i reference board for hot pics and excessive drooling. Thanks much.

P.P.S. If you have some more of that mad 0vercl0x0r ram and a cherry-picked C2D handy, I wouldn't object in the least.

P.P.P.S. My birthday and Xmas are both coming up, and I've been a good little boy all year.

So what exactly is the purpose of motherboard manufactuers anymore?

With boards like this basically being dropped in their laps all they need to do is re-badge it and mark it up a bit. I know Abit and Asus haven't shown off their boards yet but when things come this complete there really isn't much they can do to the board besides change the color scheme, add a few new ports and warranty it.

This Freaking mobo is fast... must have if you have the C2D processor..

Pretty impressive. Great layout, great stock performance, great features (well, except for Realtek audio) and great overclocking.What more could you want?

Pity about the power consumption, but I don't think that will be a major hurdle for people looking to run SLI/triple GPUs.

At last, a reference design that even ABit can't screw up*

*(waits to be proven wrong)

But now that you found the 6700 cpu you've been using all along was what was holding back your other reviewed boards' overclocking results, you'll have to go back and do them all over again...

I'm also left to wonder if increasing voltages on the CPU, chipset, etc. would have produced even faster stable speeds on the 6300 you bought for the review.

I'd like to see how much heat that extra power use produces, too. nVidia has had that problem in motherboards lately, and it is something that should be tested on each new product they release.

Yay, finally a new CPU for motherboard overclocking tests. Impressive chipset all around. Now we just need some PCI-E peripherals to come out, these new motherboards make things tough on anyone who uses two PCI cards and wants to utilize the dual graphics options.

Am I the only one always skipping the Cachemem latency graphs-page?

This chipset is the final nail in RD600's coffin.

Interesting board, shame about the power consumption.

Any hints on when we will be getting a review of the 650 SLI or ultra?

Man I want this. I *LOVE* reference designed hardware. It just makes everything so much easier and clean.

Digg Dugged

This chipset is the final nail in RD600's coffin.

Don't count ATI (AMD?) out yet. If they're somehow able to trump this chipset, I'd pounce on an RD600 as soon as I found it. It would take some serious work, though. The 680i's bloody impressive.

ok but in england its $500

lol nfurnace

Ugh, going to take a couple days to read all these reviews!

Please digg, if you will.

http://digg.com/hardware/New_nForce_680i_SLI_chipset_shows_off_over...