Up Close & Personal

     The EVGA 680i SLI motherboard has a pretty standard layout. One thing you may notice is the use of heat pipe cooling technology for the nForce SPP (System Platform Processor) and MCP (Media & Communications Processor). The motherboard does not come with the SPP cooling fan installed. In fact it's optional. The SPP heatsink is what we refer to as a passive cooler. It relies on air being pushed from the CPU heatsink. Passive cooling is effective, but it's not the best method.

     If you need better cooling and chances are you will if you are building a high end gaming rig, EVGA has included a cooling fan that snaps onto the SPP heatsink. The cooling fan snaps onto the side of the heatsink that faces away from the CPU so the fan will not get in the way of the CPU heatsink.

     EVGA has located their SATA and IDE ports right next to each other. I like this idea because it helps when it comes to neatly routing all those cables.

     In the photo above you will also notice there is a 4-pin power port right next to the IDE and SATA ports. This is the Graphics Card Auxiliary Power Port to help power those power hunger SLI graphics cards. The front panel headers are also located right next to the Graphics Card Auxiliary Power Port. With all these cables and wires right next to each other it will be easy to bundle them all together keeping the board and the inside of the computer case looking neat and clean.

     Here we have the I/O ports. EVGA gives you 6 USB 2.0 ports and 1 IEEE 1394 port. Include those with the headers for front I/O parts and you have more than enough ports for all those external devices like cameras, printers, scanners and hard drives. Those silly serial and printer ports used back in the 80's are long gone.

     As for audio ports, this motherboard has integrated 8-Channel High Definition Audio by Azalia. With great sounding integrated audio, you really have to think twice before you purchase an audio card upgrade.

     Here we have a pair of EVGA SLI ready cards installed. A pair of graphics cards installed on this board looks pretty sweet. This is also where you'll go broke building your system. At $600+ for a single top end graphics card, you can easily dump $3000 into just video cards, motherboard, CPU and memory. As for me, I picked up a pair of inexpensive EVGA 7600GT SLI cards with 256mb of GDDR3 from www.clubit.com. If you want to go fast, but don't want to spend $1200 on a pair of video cards, I highly suggest looking into the 7900GT cards. They are fast and you just can't beat the price.