NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI Preview

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 Specifications & Features

We've posted a number of articles in the past with information relative to today's launch of the nForce 600i series of chipsets.  We've also got a comprehensive look at the new GeForce 8800 Series of graphics cards posted, which are launching alongside these new nForce chipsets today.  But for a look at more details regarding NVIDIA's multi-GPU SLI platform as a whole, we recommend taking a look at a few of our other recent articles:

• NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX / 8800 GTS
• AMD Socket AM2 Processors & NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI
• NVIDIA's Multi-GPU Strategy: SLI
• NVIDIA nForce 4 SLIX16 Performance Showcase

We know that's a lot of reading, but the information and performance data in the articles listed above will give you the background information and architectural details necessary to fully understand the new products being announced today. If you're unclear about anything on the proceeding pages, we recommend looking back to these articles for more information.