NVIDIA nForce 680i LT SLI

BIOS and Overclocking

eVGA's nForce 680i LT SLI board comes equipped with an Award BIOS which is more or less identical to the BIOS featured on their full 680i SLI board. While the particular BIOS we used was still technically a beta revision, we found the board to be extremely stable, even when heavily overclocked.

While many boards note the ability for to revert to "safe" settings when overclocked too far (instead of just hanging at the startup screen), most boards typically don't handle this feature well. We found that the eVGA board was excellent in this regard, simply dropping us back to the BIOS menu if we tried to overclock too much. It's simple and safe to find your maximum overclock with this board, without having to reset the CMOS and swap jumpers. 

FSB / Memory Clock Alteration

Memory Timing Alteration

While the board technically only supports FSB speeds up to 1333 MHz and DDR speeds up to 800 MHz, we found that our test board was able to go much higher. On the front side bus level, we were able to take our 1066 MHz Core 2 Duo E6600 processor up to 1800 MHz front side bus speed with very slight voltage boosts. On the DDR2 side, we were able to bring modules up to 1185 MHz, just short of the 1200 MHz offered by full 680i SLI boards. The BIOS allows for much higher levels, too, if your components can handle such levels. Also offered is a wide range of memory tweaking functions, along with voltage alteration for vCore, FSB, memory, and SPP. You can also monitor fans and adjust fan speeds (depending on load, or hard-set their speeds) in the BIOS as well. While a board like the Asus Striker Extreme will give you more tweaking options, we're happy with the options which this board provides, which we feel will be enough to satisfy the needs of all but the most hardcore overclockers.

We've run a set of benchmarks at stock speeds along with overclocked speeds, so you can see what kind of performance one can get with a simple air-clocked overclocked system. For these tests, we took our Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4 GHz) and clocked it up to 3.15 GHz (1800 MHz) FSB, and boosted our memory clock from 800 MHz up to 1066 MHz at CAS 4-4-4-12 timings. 

Voltage Alteration

Voltage and Thermal Monitoring