Nvidia 680i Motherboard Comparison Part 2

ECS PN2 SLI2+: Soupe Du Jour

A popular diner served onion soup every day as its "soup du jour". I once asked the waitress "didn’t you serve this same soup yesterday ?" to which she replied "that was yesterday’s, this is today’s." And so it goes with Nvidia’s reference motherboards : "Carte du jour" is the ECS PN2 SLI2+.

Feature Overview

You’ve seen this board before, using the same design and components but different stickers. It’s produced by the same "manufacturing partner" and even uses the same reference BIOS as your "other" favorite 680i reference board brand. Pooling of certain support feedback has allowed BIOS improvements to move along at a rate not seen in competing products, but each brand has its own customer support department, warranty policy, accessory kit and price structure.

Another advantage for Nvidia’s reference design marketing partners is that this board will always be the basis for comparing third-party designs. Three PCI-Express slots allow special graphics card configurations including triple-independent cards for excessive monitor support, SLI plus a third card for top performance plus additional desktop area or two graphics display cards plus a third graphics card to be used as a physics processor.

On the upper front and top edges to ease cable management, there are 24-Pin ATX and eight-Pin ATX12V connectors , with the ATX12V latch facing upwards to add thumb room during removal. Other power connectors include a rarely-needed four-pin supplemental supply for PCI-Express slots located in front of DIMM latches, a four-pin CPU fan header with pulse width modulation speed control and six three-pin case fan headers.

Two Serial ATA ports and the floppy header face forward near the bottom of the board so as to slip under long graphics card coolers, while the remaining four Serial ATA and single Ultra ATA connectors face upward from the motherboard’s top half. Access to the lower connectors could be problematic for some "tight" chassis, whenever a drive cage is immediately adjacent to motherboard area.

System tuners will appreciate the Port 80 diagnostics LED display located beneath the Southbridge, which is useful in troubleshooting the plethora of boot issues they can face, especially when overclocking.

Front-Panel connector placement is mixed : Two Universal Serial Bus headers supporting four USB ports are within easy reach of most front panel connectors, but the IEEE-1394 FireWire port is obscured between slots five and six towards the motherboard’s rear edge. Front-Panel audio is defiantly located in the bottom rear corner, daring builders to find a way to make their cables reach. Yet in spite of misgivings, this reference design has fewer configuration snags than most competing designs.

A solid but standard controller set aims to get the most performance for the least added cost from the already-expensive 680i chipset. The one add-in that isn’t simply an extension of chipset features is the IEEE-1394 FireWire controller, which is an interface that has come to be expected at this price level.

Rear- panel connections eliminate parallel and serial ports in an effort to improve VRM cooling. PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports are the "last gasp" for legacy interfaces while six USB ports address more technically current human interface device needs. Dual-gigabit networking, one of the two available Firewire ports, digital optical audio output and the full six analog audio connectors round out the selection.