Motherboards outfitted with NVIDIA's nForce 680i chipset have been available since November of 2006. Although I held off getting one, I kept abreast with the chipset by reading all the reviews and checking forum threads on the how the nForce 680i motherboards were performing.
Several of NVIDIA's partners were supplying motherboards at launch, but no announcements from ASUS, DFI, Gigabyte, or MSI had been made. Several rumors concerning availability began to surface, but nothing really caught my attention until this past December when MSI announced that they would be offering nForce 650i and 680i motherboards.
MSI P6N SLI Platinum Motherboard
Unfamiliar with the nForce 650i chipset, I started reading up on everything I could get my hands on. When the first nForce 650i motherboards hit the market, I picked up the ASUS P5N-E SLI.
MSI P6N SLI Platinum
That was back in mid-January and up until the second week of March I had been regularly tweaking my system in addition to setting up a dual-boot configuration with Windows XP and Windows Vista.
In fact, I had just started to set up my games and testing in Vista when I received the P6N SLI Platinum from MSI to review.