eVGA 680i LT SLI Motherboard Review

The Motherboard Layout

The layout on the 680i SLI LT motherboard is identical to the 680i SLI as they both share the same PCB design. The 680i SLI LT has been stripped of the extra frills and features a ‘less cool’ green PCB. According to nVidia the ‘LT’ differs bt removing the LED POST codes, on-board power/reset buttons, 3rd PCIe slot for graphics expansion, changed from a black to green PCB and introduces a new flexible thermal solution for cooling the chipsets.

The massive heat pipe and cooling fan found on the 680i SLI is gone and this small ‘pancake’ style chipset cooler was found to be cooling the SPP. As you will found out later in the article this chipset cooler was found to get quite warm when the platform was overclocked.

The MCP also has active cooling, so if you’re not a big fan of active cooling on chipsets brace yourself! This shot also shows the missing third PCIe slot and down by the two blue USB headers the diagnostic LED displays have not been installed on the 680i SLI LT motherboard.

Only a single Gigabit Ethernet connection is present on the 680i SLI LT motherboard and since the entire ‘stack’ was removed the LT also has two less USB connectors. The GigE connection is still served by the Marvell 88E1116 Gigabit controller.

Also gone are the on-board power/reset buttons and the speaker that was located just to the left of them. The 680i SLI LT is no longer ‘work-bench’ friendly, but for those that use a case this shouldn’t be an issue. The speaker button and a large capacitor are also missing from the 680i LT SLI as seen in the image above.

With the eVGA 680i SLI LT and the eVGA 680i SLI motherboards it’s obvious that they come from the same blood line with the only major differences being some items removed on the 680i SLI LT motherboard to reduce the price of the produce. If you’d like to take a look at a larger 1024×469 image with both boards side by side please click here.