EVGA 122-CK-NF68 A1 680i Review

Got the new motherboard in the other day, and thought I'd post my thoughts of it.

First off, the general layout of the board is great. Most of the connections are grouped together on the board, making wire management easy with wire ties. I like the general color of the board to. Nothing to overly flashing. Simple black PCB, with a variety of white and black PCI connectors.

As far as options, I noticed them right off the start. I always run a bench test, to make sure everything is in proper order. And when bench testing, as I'm sure you all know, you have to short the pins to power the system up. EVGA,(I'm sure other too) have made Power and Reset switches right on the board itself. Really easy to get to, and worked like a charm the first time. The other thing that I noticed at the start is 2 LED boxes, that shoot out number codes when booting. If there is a problem, you look at the code its telling you, then go to your manual and look it up. No more guessing what the faulty part is in the system. The motherboard tells you!

Full specs of the board here. But a nice surprise is 3x PCI-E slots. Super nice for a SLI setup, then another slot is still open for whatever.

So I get everything installed, throw on widers on to one of my drives, load all the essential programs on there, and start overclocking.

I start out at 2.5Ghz, because I know my chip can do that for sure, that's what I had it up to on my older ASUS P5N-SLI board.
Of course, it boots up no problem. So I continue to raise everything, stopping every now and then to stress test the system, to make sure it's stable.
I guess I should list my specs, so you know what I'm working with.

-E6320@1.86Ghz Stock
-2x1Gb Crucial Ballastix Tracer PC2-6800 (DDR2-1000)
-BFG 7800GT
-Couple of 80Gb SATA II drives
-Coolermaster GeminII HSF with 2x120mm fans.

Anywho, I ended up getting board of messing with numbers, so I gave up for the first night stopping @ 3.3Ghz, RAM @900Mhz
The next morning I continued to play with setting, adjusting and stress testing, over and over again, when I hit my limit. I'm pretty sure heat is the cause at this point, my load temps being about 65°C when stress testing, which is too high for me. But here's the weird thing.
My voltage for the CPU is set to 1.39 volts. I've barely upped my voltage, and at this point, I'm almost at 100% OC.
I went ahead an validated it, mainly because I'm surprised that I got this high, also I'm scouring the interweb trying to find the record overclock for my CPU. I know I can't be that far off. But i got it to 3.51Ghz.
I'm not for sure yet if it's completely stable, only have ran ORTHOS for about 2 hours, in fact, I'm running it as I type this up..

So, for the record, this board kicks ass.
If you are even considering a 680i board, or just a good board to overclock on, this is what you should get!

Thanks for reading, and I'll let you get back to your regular spamming..