XFX 680i LT and 650i Ultra Motherboard Reviews

680i LT Board Layout

The XFX 680i LT board come in the standard reference design, so there are no surprises as we look at this board compared to other boards of the same chipset, but different branding. The LT boards come with a green PCB in comparison to the black PCB of the full 680i boards.

The top right of the board is where we find our Dimm slots. This board supports DDR2 memory architecture up to 8 GB, in Dual-channel configuration, at speeds of DDR2 800/667/533/400. To the right of the dimm slots, we actually see quite a bit crammed in. You have your 24-pin power connector towards the top. An IDE connector is located just under that. To the left of the IDE connector is a 4-pin molex power connector, which adds stability to the board when running in an SLi configuration. Just under the 4-pin molex connector we find our four SATA connectors. These connectors are powered by the Nvidia chipset, and are SATAII compliant. They also support running RAID in 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD.

We mentioned this is a review or two already, but this are of the board is crammed full of stuff, making cable routing a potential problem.

The bottom right of the board shows us the cooling for the north and south bridges. Once again, this is a reference design, so we have a passive cooling setup for the southbridge, which seems just fine as it did not even get hot during our testing. As you will see on the 650i Ultra board, there is NO active or passive cooling. The battery and bios are on this part of the board, as well as an assortment of IEEE1394 and USB headers.

The bottom left of the board is where we will find our add-in card slots. The board has a total of 6 expansion card slots for use. It includes two legacy pci slots, 2 x1 pci-e slots, and 2 x16 pci-e slots that are able to run an SLi configuration.

We also have our lan and audiochips here.

Audioon the XFX 680i LT board powered by the Realtek ALC885, and supports Intel 8-channel HD Audio. This sound solution should be fine for all but the most critical audiophile.

The NVIDIA Native Gigabit Ethernet is powered by the Marvell 88E1116 Gigabit Fast Ethernet chip. Another thing that sets the full 680i boards apart from the 680i LT boards is that the LT boards only have one Lan port.

The top left of the boad is where we find our CPU socket, which is pretty clear of anything that could be a hindrance to instaling any cooling devices. We also have the 8-pin power connector tucked nicely in the top left corner, a great placement!

The back I/O ports give us our typical PS/2 mouse and keyboard inputs, as well as 4 USB, one firewire, one lan, one optical and our six audio ports.

Moving along…