Realtek has had troubles recently with EAX 2.0 support but we did notice a slight improvement in the 1.61 driver set with several games, although Battlefield 2 continues to present problems for Realtek. The audio subsystem is based on the Realtek ALC885 and offers 8-channel output. The I/O panel also features an IEEE 1394a port. The audio panel consists of six ports that can be configured for 2, 4, 6, and 8-channel audio along with an S/PDIF optical out port. The LAN port has two LED indicators representing Activity and Speed of the connection through the Marvell Gigabit PCI-E PHY.
The rear panel contains the standard PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, LAN port, and four USB 2.0 ports. The VRM components are passively cooled and the 8-pin ATX power connector is located out of the way. The 680i LT SPP chipset is actively cooled with a mid-rise heatsink/fan unit that did not interfere with any installed peripherals but was loud in our opinion. We utilized the stock heatsink/fan in our normal testing but also verified a few larger Socket-775 air cooling solutions would fit in this area during our overclocking tests. Getting back to the CPU socket area, we find an excellent amount of room for alternative cooling solutions. This would have meant that both PCI Express x1 slots would have been open even with dual-slot SLI. It would have been nice if the second PCI Express x1 connector had been moved to the vacant spot where the missing third x16 slot would have been located. We would also have switched the first PCI and second PCI Express x16 connector in order to give the second video card additional space, as our secondary 8800GTX tended to act like a vacuum cleaner for the bottom of our case. The second PCI Express x1 slot will be physically unavailable as will the second PCI connector if you utilize a double slot card in either x16 slots. The layout of this design offers a good but not spectacular dual x16 connector design. The board comes with two PCI Express x16 connectors, two PCI Express x1, and two PCI connectors. However, one of the main design objectives with this board was not to encroach upon the 680i boards in overclocking capabilities so this decision is slightly confusing to us.
We do not mind active cooling solutions on chipsets that run hot or on a board designed with overclocking in mind. We know this is one of the areas targeted for cost reduction but most people will find the noise obtrusive at times, and we are also concerned about the life expectancy of the fans. Both the SPP and MCP are actively cooled with fans that tended to have a noticeable whine on power-up and remained at 100% speed throughout testing as fan speed cannot be controlled.Ĭonsidering other boards in the price range have passive cooling solutions we have to question NVIDIA's decision on using an active cooling solution. There are four fan headers (one 4-pin, three 3-pin) located in easy to reach positions on the board but only the CPU fan offers automatic fan control capabilities within the BIOS. The board features an excellent six-phase power design and a mixture of conductive polymer aluminum solid capacitors and high-quality aluminum electrolytic capacitors. The board easily installed into our Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 case while cable management was good for the optical and hard drives. The board layout that NVIDIA devised for the 680i LT chipset is quite good but we would have preferred a black PCB design instead of the pedestrian green.
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