Our nForce 680i LT SLI motherboard arrived in an EVGA box bearing a 122-CK-NF67 model name, and it will apparently be available starting today for just under $200. The very same board will also be offered by XFX as the MB-N680-ILT.
Nvidia's first attempt at a retail motherboard design used a black PCB to attract enthusiasts looking for a little visual flair. This latest LT, however, uses a plain green board that more closely resembles the reference designs we're used to seeing.
Interestingly, Nvidia hasn't changed the board layout much for the LT. That's generally a good thing, since the initial 680i SLI board design was nearly spot-on. Just look at how both of the power connectors are neatly placed along edges of the board, so power cables won't crowd the CPU socket. Someone's been paying attention to our mobo reviews.
There's plenty of room around the CPU socket for larger coolers, thanks in part to Nvidia's decision to ring the socket with shorter capacitors. The board also has a couple of passive VRM coolers that should help dissipate the extra heat created by enterprising overclockers.
Presumably in an attempt to cut costs, Nvidia has elected to go with active chipset cooling on its LT motherboard. The north bridge chip is capped with a relatively low-profile heatsink that Nvidia has topped off with a fan that's entirely too loud for a $200 motherboard. Seriously, plenty of mobos in this price range make do with passive chipset cooling, including those based on the nForce 680i SLI chipset. Nvidia shouldn't have to resort to whiny chipset fans.
Apparently giving us one noisy chipset fan wasn't enough; the south bridge also sports an active chipset cooler. By now, I'm sure it's clear that we're not huge, er, fans of active chipset cooling. Initial fan whine is one issue, but we've also found that the tiny fans commonly used in chipset coolers tend to get much louder over time. Those fans tend to fail abruptly, as well—a problem you don't encounter with passive designs that lack moving parts.
At least the south bridge cooler is short enough to leave plenty of clearance for longer graphics cards, including Nvidia's own GeForce 8800 GTX. Nvidia has taken special care to ensure that longer double-wide graphics cards won't block access to any storage ports, which are neatly lined up along the edge of the board.
While the nForce 680i SLI board design features a third PCI Express x16 slot ostensibly meant for future physics products, that slot is missing from the LT. That leaves the board with pairs of PCI, PCIe x1, and PCIe x16 slots, which should be more than enough for most folks. We do wish that the board's second PCIe x1 slot were moved down one place into the vacant space left by the missing x16 slot, though. Then double-wide graphics cards installed in the primary x16 slot wouldn't block an x1 slot.
Without a parallel port, serial port, or secondary Ethernet jack at the rear, the 680i LT's port cluster looks a little bare. Nvidia has populated it with the essentials, including Firewire, six analog audio outputs, and a TOS-Link digital S/PDIF output. There are four USB ports, as well, with headers for an additional four ports onboard.
