The gang at t-break has gotten a new ECS PN1-SLI2 motherboard that uses the new 680i chipset from NVIDIA.  You can also check out my initial review of the 680i chipset here. 

It’s also one the few boards that will allow you to run an SLi setup under Intel’s Core 2 as a lot of older nForce 5xx based boards don’t work with Core 2 and require a refresh as far as we know. Since the nForce 600 series is right around the corner, a lot of manufacturers skipped this update for the their nForce 5xx series of motherboards.

This brings up to the topic of choosing an nForce 590 board over the upcoming 600 series. While we haven’t received any boards based on the 600 series, from what we’ve been reading, there aren’t many changes as far as features are concerned. However, nVidia has supposedly improved upon overclocking but we’ll only comment on that once we receive retail samples in our labs.

The ECS PN1 SLI2  overclocked upto 315MHz FSB which, although not a record setter, is decent enough for the casual overclocker. It’s feature set, especially SLI under core 2 and Firewire 800 should also attract people in those respective market segments. The overall performance is as good as any other high-end board for Core 2 at the moment. If you’re not necessarily a hard core overclocker, we think that the ECS PN1 SLI2 would be a pretty good choice for a Core 2 setup.