EVGA 680i SLI

INTRODUCTION

NVIDIA used to be the kings of motherboard chipsets for the AMD platform. While they did release some chipsets for the Intel platform their true focus lay on creating the best possible chipsets for the AMD CPU’s. That is until two things happened. Number one is of course the success of the Core 2 Duo from Intel. Unless you are a real Intel fanboy there is no denying that AMD used to have the CPU’s that gave the most bang for the buck for a long time. This however changed with the Core 2 Duo. Suddenly enthusiasts where starting to flock over to the Intel camp buying all sorts of Intel i965 and i975 motherboards. Naturally NVIDIA wants a piece of that cake to. The second reason is of course the fact that AMD went and bought ATI. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that NVIDIA not necessarily would like to indirectly only support their only real competitor in the video card market.

So with the nForce6 NVIDIA went all out and released the chipset first for the Intel platform. After the less than stellar nForce590 for Intel a lot of people, including me, were a bit cautious and didn’t know what to expect. Has NVIDIA learned their lesson and delivered an Intel experience as solid as we used to expect from their AMD chipsets? Read on to find out when we test the EVGA 680i SLI.

ABOUT EVGA

I have been trying to find some more information about the company EVGA. Unfortunately they do not have any information on their site. There are pressreleases dating back to 2003 suggesting they have been around at least that long. They have always only done NVIDIA based products, both video cards and motherboards. The 680i SLi motherboard is actually "designed by NVIDIA" motherboard which NVIDIA have designed and built and then sold to eVGA so they can market it as their own.