eVGA 680i LT SLI Motherboard Review

Overclocking

When it came to overclocking the eVGA 680i LT SLI motherboard it turned out to be a really fun time as overclocking was found to be easy and the results were impressive. Using the Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor we left the multiplier at seven and cranked up the front side bus (FSB) to the point the system was unstable. Our little E6300 started life out at 1.86GHz, but after increasing the voltage up to 1.4625V and using the Corsair Nautilus 500 water cooler we were able to hit 3.37GHz on the very same chip. This is a 1.5GHz overclock, which is great for a budget friendly processor like the Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6300.

When it comes to voltages 1.4625Vcore was used to reach this overclock and while it is impressive the overclock was lower than what we were able to get on the 680i SLI with all of the same hardware. When overclocking the 680i SLI we were able to reach 490MHz FSB, while on the 680i LT SLI just 481MHz FSB was reached. This is a 1.8% difference when it came to overclocking, which isn’t bad considering the 680i LT SLI is 20% cheaper than the 680i SLI. One of the limiting factors to the overclocking was found to be the chipset cooling on the north bridge. The surface temperature of the actively cooled heat sink would reach 55-60C when overclocked under load and could have been limiting the overclock.

When it comes to overclocking the results are amazing as the Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 really comes to life with the extra bandwidth and increased clock frequency. When running Super Pi at stock speeds and then again at the max overclock the performance improvement was noted being ~40% on numerous benchmarks, which is nothing less than impressive. It’s obvious that this board will run upcoming 1333MHz FSB processors when Intel releases them later this year.