DFI LAN Party UT NF680I LT SLI-T2R Motherboard Review

Digital PWM (Digital Pulse Width Modulation) power supplies are becoming the norm on high end hardware and the DFI NF680I LT comes with an impressive 6-Phase version with enough power to supply 200A of juice to the processor. A copper heatsink is attached to help dissipate the heat.

Memory support is a typical 8GB of DDR2 at speeds of up to 800Mhz. Having used 1066Mhz memory for this review at a 1:1 clock setting we can attest that faster memory will run on this motherboard without any issues.

The expansion slots come in a very nice configuration and take full advantage of what is available in the nVidia 680i LT chipset. The board comes with 3 16x PCIe slots but only 2 support a full 16 lanes of PCIe, The 3rd (located at the bottom of the board) is 8x and is designed for a spare video card or physics processor. An interesting thing to note is that you can connect 2 video cards with the supplied SLI bridge regardless of what 16x slots you choose to use. (however using the bottom slot will render SLI at 8x/16x and hurt performance)

The only thing layout wise that I would change is to move the 4x PCIe slot down below the second 16x PCIe video slot. The reason being if you happen to be using a dual slot GPU cooler the 4x slot will become useless and negate having it there at all. On a similar cooling related note even with a standard GPU cooler if the 4x slot is populated airflow to the GPU cooler will be restricted.

Dual Net is a new nVidia feature that enables to you bind 2 gigabit Ethernet controllers together for a faster network. The photo here shows the 2 PHY chips that convert the Ethernet "stub" into a real connection, in this case RJ45.

The 680i LT supports 6 SATA2 connections however the "R" at the end of DFI model name denotes an extra 2 SATA2 connectors on an independent controller. The Silicon Image 3132 has been called into action here and converts the last "unused" PCIe 1x slot into 2 SATA2 drive connections with RAID.