Fr0stByte: Motherboard is Here

Post by Maxime Rousseau

06 Sep 2007

Finally, a piece that makes my case finally look like something useful has arrived. It came in a brown box which in the beginning made me ask myself if I had order a Blendtec Industrial Blender or an EVGA mobo. In the end it was indeed a mobo, and a kick-arse one if I might add. Performance specs:

NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI chipset, the best on the market up to now
1333 FSB support (Which I will use with my e6750 which runs only at 1333)
4 RAM DIMMs, of which two are in use by my Corsair XMS2 sticks, in dual channel configuration
HUGE chipset heatsink, with an optional fan that I will use.
3 PCI-E slots, and from what I read these are all 16x. I might be totally illiterate, but the PCB below clearly indicates that. Triple SLI?
A wide array of USB connections, and even bare pins inside for further extension through the case or whatnot. I <3 USB.
Dual RJ gigabit connections, which allows for splitting a full duplex connection over two ethernet lines. Yes, you understood right: a dedicated up line, and a dedicated down line. 1 gigabit per second on each side.
Constructed purposely for the overclocking of the Core 2 Duo line of processors. Of which I am buying the second best, the e6750. Ha. 3.4 ghz on air cooling anyone?
It even has the power and reset buttons built in on the board, which is very useful.

In addition to be really, really hot performance wise, or at least theoretically, it is also very visually appealing. I was expecting the slick black PCB and all, which in itself is very cool, but there was more, much more. The motherboard is fitted with 3-4 tiny LEDs, one which indicates that power reaches the board, and the others indicating POST error messages, very useful for overclocking, since there is no speaker pinning on the board for a case speaker to broadcast POST messages through. Also very neat is the onboard digital display, which according to me will give the system temperature once I get a processor mounted in there.

Check out my unboxing gallery.

Also, since this is one of the biggest parts, I was able to start installing stuff in my case and optimizing the whole thing. The ever so long power supply cables are all now neatly folded out of sight, and I mounted a temporary CD drive to get an idea of what the finished product will look like. I`ve setup a flickr gallery for that right here.