nVvidia nForce 680i LT SLI

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Nvidia has succeeded in creating a more affordable motherboard design with the nForce 680i LT SLI, but they've had to perform relatively major surgery to get the board under $200. We can live without some of the amenities that have been cut, such as EPP memory support beyond 800MHz and a couple of USB ports. Given our review sample's ability to run a 480MHz front-side bus, we're not too worried that Nvidia only rates the LT's overclocking potential as "good," either.

Unfortunately, a couple of Nvidia's LT amputations are harder to swallow. The lack of a second Gigabit Ethernet port is puzzling at best—and practically inexcusable for a $200 motherboard. Few users may actually need that second networking port, but with virtually every $200 board sporting dual GigE options, the LT starts to look a little stingy.

That's not the worst of it, though. The LT's active chipset coolers are easily the board's most disappointing features. Intricate arrays of heatpipes and passive coolers are all the rage these days, and although we don't insist on an ornate cooling apparatus, a $200 motherboard should at the very least offer quiet chipset cooling. With a pair of chipset fans that lack temperature-based fan speed control, the LT's chipset cooling solution is neither elegant nor quiet.

Now, just because Nvidia chose to cut corners in the cooling department doesn't mean that other board vendors have to as well. While EVGA, XFX, and others will be offering rebadged reference boards, the LT will also be available as a chipset, so it's possible that some motherboard makers will roll their own custom designs. Those designs will have to at least incorporate better chipset cooling to be competitive in a market laced with dual-slot P965 and 975X boards selling for less than $200. But the LT boasts SLI support that you don't get with Intel chipsets—and with a full 16 lanes of bandwidth to each card—so it does have a leg up in the multi-GPU arena. We're just not sure how many mobo makers are going to want to invest board design resources for a chipset that's so similar to the existing nForce 680i SLI.