You might get the impression that we're saying the 680i SLI and LT are bad chipsets, but you'd be wrong. It's the reference designs that EVGA has used that cause all the problems, and we can prove it. Reaching for an Asus P5N32-SLI, which we just happened to have on the shelf, we used nTune to achieve the same pathetic 2.85GHz that we saw on the EVGA LT, but we then went on to manually overclock the CPU to 3.25GHz on a 1300MHz FSB. This Asus board costs £155.

PCMark05 Overall

Longer bars are better

We asked Asus if it plans to bring out an LT-based board, but were told that the chipset is of no interest to the company as it has the P5N32-E Plus, which is a combination of a 680i northbridge and a 590 southbridge that's priced at £119.

3DMark06

Longer bars are better

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Verdict

On the face of it, the 680i LT SLI does away with a few frills and extras to deliver superb performance at a reduced price. Our experience of these two reference designs was rather disappointing, however our test figures show that other motherboards with nForce chipsets can deliver gaming performance in spades. The moral of this tale seems to be, avoid boards that reproduce nVidia's reference motherboard designs.