DFI Lanparty UT NF680i LT SLI-T2R Motherboard

Closer Look:

With the change in the coloring of the packaging, DFI kept the motherboard the familiar UV reactive orange and yellow. A couple of things I noticed right away were the active cooling on the Southbridge and the absence of the big heat-pipe connected series of heatsinks that most 680i chipset boards come with. Something great right out of the box considering I prefer an after market cooling solution.

Looking at the I/O section of the board, we have a few connection options available. The standard PS2 connections for your mouse and keyboard are still available. Six USB 2.0/1.1 slots, one 1394 Firewire port, optical sound connections and 2 gigabit LAN connections are included.The Karajan audio module fills the open space in the I/O area and mounts to the audio riser seen in the second photo.

This board comes with 3 PCIe 16x slots - great if you are running a dual GPU system, as both slots one and two will run at 16x bandwidth, while slot three will run at 8x and can be used with a physics card. The 3 PCI slots are not really in usable positions if you are using dual GPUs with two-slot cooling solutions. This pretty much includes any high-end video cards. I have found this issue with the last few boards I have used, so this problem is not exclusive to DFI. Another thing to note is that the 4-pin floppy connectors that are needed close to the 16x PCIe slots. These power connections need to be made to provide stability to the system.

This motherboard has almost all the drive connections on the right-hand edge for easy access - something that I really like. 8GB of memory is supported on this motherboard by filling all four slots. You will need a native 24-pin PSU for this board.

Being an enthusiast grade product, this board has some features that are great for the enthusiast. The on-board debug LED is great for diagnosing boot issues. Power and reset switches are ideal for the benchmarking crowd who run without cases - no more using a screwdriver to jump the switch connections. Additional SATA and USB connections are some of these features, as we all need more and more drive space and USB accessories.The 680i LT chipset is the center that all these features revolve around.

You will notice that this board has a lot of room around the CPU socket without all the capacitors that are normally seen in this area. This is due to the board using a 6-phase digital power management circuit for the CPU. The Southbridge heatsink resembles the Evercool VC-RE, but appears to be larger in size. Hopefully this will result in increased cooling capabilities.