NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI Preview

How we configured our test systems: When configuring our test systems for the following set of benchmarks, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for DDR2-800 with 4,4,4,12 1T timings. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the drivers necessary for our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, and we set up a 1024MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems AMD & Intel Inside!

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2007 suite (CPU, Multimedia, and Memory) with the new EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard. All of the scores reported below were taken with our Core 2 Duo X6800 processor running at its default clock speed of 2.93GHz. 

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2007
Synthetic Benchmarks

CPU Core 2 Duo X6800 @ 2.93GHz nForce 680i SLI

Multimedia Core 2 Duo X6800 @ 2.93GHz nForce 680i SLI

Memory Bandwidth Core 2 Duo X6800 @ 2.93GHz nForce 680i SLI

SANDRA's relatively light-duty CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth benchmarks didn't reveal anything out of the ordinary.  The EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard performed right on par with, or slightly better than the 975X Express reference system in SADNRA's database in the CPU and Multimedia tests.  The Memory Bandwidth benchmark, however, showed the 975X Express with a slight edge, but advantages in a synthetic test like this one don't always translate into any real-world performance gains.