More Than Just a 'Paper Launch': 680i Motherboard Comparison, Part 1

Test Setup

BIOS improvements have made Foxconn's 975X7AB-8EKRS2H competitive with top-priced parts and are a good implementation of Intel's 975X chipset by which to compare Nvidia's 680i performance. We used the most recent P20 BIOS version.

Cooler Master's Hyper TX offered a significant heat reduction compared to our most recent previous game platform shootout. Lower temperatures did not further our achievable clock speeds because we refused to push our core beyond a hopefully-safe 1.50V

NVIDIA claims its 8800GTX graphics processor and 680i chipset are optimized to work together. Rather than question Nvidia's marketing integrity, we accepted this opportunity to sample from Foxconn's new graphics line.

Crucial's Ballistix might not be the greatest "bang for the buck" memory on the market, but its stability proved superb in this test. In fact, our 680i benchmarks used the "800 MHz" at CAS 4-4-4-8 and 1T command rate. Were that not enough, we then pushed them stably to "1066 MHz" at the same latencies simply by raising the command rate to 2T! The 975X comparison board defaults to a 2T command rate and lacks manual control for such.

Western Digital's aging Raptor 150 still represents the pinnacle of desktop single-drive performance, with 10,000RPM boosting seek times and 16 MB cache assisting repetitive reads.