EVGA nForce 680i SE Motherboard 122-CK-NF63-TR Review

 

A Better Look at Things

The color scheme of the EVGA motherboards’ box instantly reminded me of Nvidia, I’m guessing this is purposeful by EVGA. The front of the box has a small picture of the mobo, along with its’ name and there’s that ‘SE’ for Special Edition I mentioned earlier… I still don’t see what’s so ‘Special’ about it. The back of the box lists all the specs, features, contents and even has a comparison chart listing other EVGA 680i motherboards.

 

Opening the box I was surprised to not see the standard anti-static bag and foam cushion that normally protects a motherboard, it was just basically encased in a plastic box like most video cards are now.

There’s really not much included with the mobo, not even a user manual… just brief quick install guide. You can download an extensive manual from the EVGA website in PDF format, but I can’t help wondering if you bought the mobo to build a computer then how would you get the manual from the website?! Oh well…

In the little box is a special chipset cooling fan that attaches to the very large heatsink mounted to the northbridge. According to the box and the quick install guide you only need to install the fan if overclocking or using liquid cooling.

 

Since this is an SLI enabled board we find an SLI bridge as well, actually we find a HUGE SLI bridge… I’ve never come across an SLI bridge that was this big before, but there’s a reason for that, there are three PCIE slots and SLI video cards are to be used with the top and bottom slots while the middle slot can be used possibly for physics…

 

Also included were stylish black cables for HDD and Floppy, along with a Molex to SATA power adapter and two SATA data cables. The SATA data cables are the ‘good’ kind that have the metal clips on the ends to make sure the cables stay connected.

 

And here’s the board itself, it’s actually rather cool looking, except for that brownish colored PCB, black would have been a much better choice I believe for this board. The layout is actually very well done, but you’ll notice there is only one IDE connector on the board… Time to make the switch to all SATA hard drives if you’re using IDE still, and of course you could get SATA optical drives as well since there are six SATA connectors on the board, you’ll have enough of them…

 

Before we get into closer detail of the motherboard we’ll stop at the back panel first. Here, you’ll notice the six USB ports, firewire, optical, 7.1 channel audio and the dual gigabit ethernet ports.