EVGA 680i LT SLI - Testing part 2
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PCMark Vantage
This is a new benchmark from Futuremark. It is very similar to PCMark05, but a whole lot more advanced. It will only run on Vista and takes around 10-15 minutes to complete. It is a lot more thorough and is a nice addition to my benchmarking programs.
Half Life 2: Lost Coast
Half-Life 2 was a great game, and this was a little present that people got that showed what they were able to do with Half-Life 2. The Lost Coast offers hi-res textures and also use of High Dynamic Range Lighting.
The 680i LT chipset does do a little better than the 650i, but nothing noticeable. While the results may make it worthwhile for you, many may find the gains unnoticeable. If you are going for every point possible, then this is for you.
So how different are the LT and regular chipsets? It costs big bucks to develop a chipset. It would be a bad idea to design another chipset just off the LT, so I began digging up what the actual differences were. I found that there isn’t much other than the physical differences in the board. I have found people that have flashed their LT boards with the regular BIOS and unlocked some features that were previously locked. I don’t think this is a huge gain, as the big difference is the 16x slot, which has been physically removed, but you do gain a few more features for free. If you put another slot in with the 680i SLI BIOS would it work? Not sure on this, maybe if someone is crazy enough to try they could chime in.
Conclusion
The EVGA 680i LT SLI motherboard is a great board. It has lots of features and is rock solid. Once again I wasn’t disappointed in an nVidia chipset. The design is very good. It’s a budget version of the top of the line chipset with what appears to be minimal design changes compared to the 680i SLI.
It’s not nearly as hot as the ASUS P5N-E SLI was and should be the same across all the reference boards with this chipset. The extra bandwidth RAM and the dual 16x slots don’t appear to have an effect on the mid range cards. If you’re not running the top of the line cards, I would suggest you could bump down to the 650i SLI and save some money.
If you are running two top of the line GPUs this isn’t a bad choice. Unless you need that third PCI Express 16x slot, I see no other reason for not choosing this board over the more expensive 680i SLI. I hope you enjoyed this review; if you have any questions or comments feel free to ask them here or visit our forums.
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