Product Listing

Foxconn N68S7AA-8EKRS2H (NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI)

By Zachary Chan - 27 Feb 2007

Overclocking and Test Setup

Overclocking

  • FSB Settings: 100MHz to 625MHz (400MHz to 2500MHz QDR)
  • DDR2 Settings: 400MHz to 1400MHz
  • PCIe 1/2/3 Settings: 100MHz to 200MHz
  • NB-SB Reference Clock: 100MHz to 500MHz
  • CPU Voltage Settings: +0.0125V to +0.2500V (in 0.0125V steps)
  • Memory Voltage Settings: 1.6914V to 2.3771V (in 0.0457V steps)
  • Memory Termination Voltage: 0.8317V to 1.1689V (in 0.0225V steps)
  • MCP Voltage Settings: 1.500V to 1.875V (in 0.025V steps)
  • SPP Voltage Settings: 1.1174V to 1.5704V (in 0.0302V steps)
  • VLDT Voltage Settings: 1.1174V to 1.5704V (in 0.0302V steps)
  • Multiplier Selection: Yes (unlocked CPUs only)


The N68S7AA-8EKRS2H has a very user friendly BIOS that shows real-time information of not only current, but also expected settings for most of its overclocking menus such as memory timings and voltages. This allows users to quickly reference current operating settings as well as their projected tweaks within the same screen, a highly valuable feature for novice and experienced overclockers alike. As expected, the board has an impressive set of tweaking options, but their ranges can be restrictive. For example, CPU voltage settings only allows up to a small increment of 0.25V.

The FoxOne IC is used to add some intelligence to the board's monitoring and overclocking capabilities.

In our own overclocking tests, the N68S7AA-8EKRS2H didn't fare too well as an extreme overclocker. Among all the nForce 680i SLI boards we've reviewed so far, the Foxconn is the only board not to pass 450MHz FSB for overclocking. The highest stable overclock we achieved with the board was 425MHz. Even without any additional voltage tweaks, the SPP would start to get really warm once the frequency was cranked up and we had to max out the SPP voltage to get the board working above 400MHz.

CPU-Z overclocking screenshot. Click for full sized image.

Test Setup

We now move on to our benchmarking section of the review. We will be putting the Foxconn N68S7AA-8EKRS2H through our usual set of benchmarks to find out just how it performs compared to its competition. As we already have a healthy sampling of nForce 680i SLI boards, we should be able to see if Foxconn can pull a hat trick with the N68S7AA-8EKRS2H in terms of performance. The following hardware configuration will be used for all the boards benchmarked unless specified otherwise:-

  • Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor (2.93GHz)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 12-4-4 CAS 4.0*
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • MSI GeForce 7900 GT 256MB - with NVIDIA ForceWare 91.47
  • NVIDIA nForce 9.53 driver set
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)


Additional Notes

  • The comparison Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6 has its RAS-CAS timing locked at 5T. Because of this, the board runs at 4-5-4-12.
  • LinkBoost and GPU Ex features are disabled for all boards during benchmarking


Benchmarks

These are the benchmarks that will be used for this review:-

  • BAPco SYSmark 2004
  • Futuremark PCMark05
  • SPECviewperf 9.0
  • Futuremark 3DMark05
  • AquaMark3
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