Verdict: SLI support, but it's noisy and a poor overclocker.

While most motherboards are designed and made by specialist companies such as Asus and Gigabyte, some boards based on the nForce 680i SLI chipset are designed and made by Nvidia.

As such, XFX has done very little to distinguish this motherboard from a reference Nvidia board, apart from slapping an XFX sticker on the box (which is also made by Nvidia), and giving it a particularly unmemorable name - the MB-N680-ISH9. That isn't such a bad thing, though, as companies such as XFX don't have any experience designing and making motherboards, while Nvidia has been doing it for several years. However, this means that, stickers aside, this motherboard is practically identical to other nForce 680i SLI motherboards sold by the likes of BFG and EVGA.

The nForce 680i SLI chipset is the oldest chipset found on any motherboard in this Labs test, although it supports the latest 1,333MHz FSB CPUs, and the forthcoming 45nm Penryn architecture CPUs, as long as you update the BIOS to the P31 revision first. Unlike the nForce 650i SLI chipset, the nForce 680i SLI supports three 16x PCI-E slots, although the latter only provides eight PCI-E lanes of bandwidth. Given that Nvidia has yet to release a driver for tri-SLI, you're only likely to use the two true 16x PCI-E slots anyway.

The nForce Southbridge provides six RAID-capable S-ATA II ports, but the hot-running Northbridge has to be cooled by a noisy little fan. This means that the MB-680-ISH9 is the only motherboard in this Labs test to have an actively cooled Northbridge - the other models have more sophisticated heatpipes or simple passively cooled heatsinks.

At its stock settings, the MB-N680-ISH9 proved to be slower than most of the Intel-based motherboards. Despite a plethora of BIOS options, the MB-N680-ISH9 was also a very poor overclocker, as it was unable to max out our test CPU, a Core 2 Duo E6750. In fact, despite several hours of fiddling in the BIOS, we were unable to raise its FSB above 425MHz, more than 100MHz less than the best P35 and X38 motherboards.

A maximum stable FSB of 425MHz is a pretty embarrassing achievement for any modern motherboard, but especially so for one costing just over £130. Given the questionable performance benefit of SLI, especially in Vista, you'd be far better off buying one of the many better Intel-based motherboards instead.

• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008

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