Originally posted by: KayKay I've yet to see any on sale, how do they stack up in terms of performance, price, and overclockability?
Well, that's just it. Nobody knows anything because nothing is available yet. So all we have at the moment are Nvidia's overview description of the chipset and a few press releases from motherboard makers.
So far I've seen announcements for 650i SLI motherboards from Asus (P5N-E SLI), MSI (P6N SLI Platinum), and Gigabyte (GA-N650SLI-DS4). These boards are all based on the 650i SLI as opposed to the non-SLI 650i Ultra. I assume 650i Ultra boards will show up eventually. But for now it seems none of the motherboard makers thinks the 650i Ultra is worth wasting words on.
When will the boards arrive? The timeframe I've always seen is a very vague phrase along the lines of "expected for late December".
As for features, the 650i boards appear to come with 4 SATA ports and 2 PATA connectors supporting up to 4 PATA devices. We've known for a while now from the overview articles about the Nvidia 600 chipsets that the 650i supports up to 4 PATA devices, But it appears that the motherboard manufacturers might actually
implement this capability! :Q WOW :Q (Probably not a big deal to anyone else, but I happen to have a
lot of PATA devices so this is good news to me).
Overclocking? Who knows for sure? We all expect it to be good because of the capabilities demonstrated by the 680i. But until someone actually has a 650i based board in hand and tests it, there is no way of knowing for sure just how well a 650i will function versus its 680i big brother. We're all just reduced to sitting around and waiting to see if when it finally does arrive, if it was worth the wait.
-john, the redundant legacy dinosaur