eVGA 680i LT SLI Motherboard Review

The 680i LT SLI BIOS

The BIOS found on the nForce 680i LT SLI series of motherboards is nearly identical to those that are found on the higher priced 680i SLI motherboards, but are stripped down a bit. Let’s take a look and see what changes were made to the board to make it a ‘great’ overclocker versus the ‘best’ overclocker that nVidia has to offer. If you can’t remember what the 680i SLI motherboard BIOS looks like please reference our review on the ECS 680i SLI to refresh your memory.

nVidia is still using the AwardBIOS that is made by Phoenix to power both the 680i and 650i motherboard series.

The FSB and Memory Config menu is identical to that of the 680i SLI. This is menu where you set up your memory to run in SLI. You also have settings that are related to the CPU FSB speed, memory speeds and memory timings. The above screen shot was taken to show that the memory can still be unlinked on the 680i LT SLI and with the FSB MHz left at stock settings the memory could be pushed to the max (1400MHz) to get an actual frequency of 1386.7MHz. The 680i LT SLI has limitations for SLI-Ready memory, but for those who manually overclock there is no limitation.

The advanced memory timings menu allows for the fine tuning of the memory modules and is identical to that of the 680i SLI.

Moving along to the system voltages menu, we finally start to notice the differences between the two boards. On the 680i SLI you can adjust six voltage settings and on the 680i SLI LT only four can be adjusted. The two missing variables are nForce MCP and HT nForce SPP <–> MCP voltage options. While all the other options are still present the highest settings are a bit different. The CPU Core Voltage on the 680i SLI went up to 1.8V and on the 680i SLI LT it has been limited to 1.6V.

The CPU FSB voltage is capped off at 1.4V whereas on the 680i SLI it went up to 1.5V.

The memory voltage options were the same as both boards top out at 2.5V, which is plenty for most DDR2 memory kits on the market today.

The final system voltage setting that was reduced is the nForce SPP setting, which used to top out at 1.55V and is now limited to 1.4V. The nForce 680i SLI motherboard has been indeed nuetered, with many of the differences in the BIOS revolving around Voltage limitations in the BIOS.