im building a new comp and im not to sure on a few things. I plan on getting the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 or 6400 but i havent decided on the motherboard. im wondering if it is worth the extra money to get the nforce 680i chipset whats the main difference between the 680 and 650 chipsets. also i was wondering if 2 geforce 8600gts would perform faster then 1 geforce 8800gts.
Performance wise, there is very little (read NO) difference between the 650 and the 680 chipset.
Feature wise there is. The 680, if memory serves me correctly, supports 3 full lenght PCI-Express slots, two at 16x of sli and the other either at 4x or 8x for future PCI-E Physics cards, where as the 650 supports only SLI and when used in SLI both slots run at 8x instead of 16 (BTW, this has a very very small, if any impact on performance with current SLI setups, look up benchmarks).
The 680i also has support for more SATA HDD (8 over 4, i think - my 650 has 4 from the chipset and 1 from another controller) and two 1GB/s ethernet connections over 1 of the 650i. It's CPU support, Maximum FSB and memory speeds all identical to each other.
For me, I went for my Asus P5N-E Sli, based on the 650i Chipset. I don't use SLI though as for me, 1 graphics card is enough. I'd have a hard job getting my X1950pro in SLI anyway, lol. My requirements didn't justify the £120+ for a 680i board when my £65 650i does all I needed it and wanted it to do.