I have a first generation EVGA 680i, and though its an awesome board, I have had problems with it. In the past, it has f'ed up hard drives, and this morning, it wouldn't post or boot, but kept beeping and stopped posting at C1. Thankfully, I fixed it by flashing the CMOS, but I was wondering if anyone else has had any problems with their 680i's, if they managed to get it fixed and if the newer firmware updates are any good. (I would try it myself, but I fear it might get worse...) MGT
**** tons of people have had problems with 680is and Nvidia's 570MCP seems somewhat prone to SATA corruption (I had it on the 790i Ultra SLI). It's fundamentally a good chipset but let down by the fact it's too hot and has a high failure rate. C1 error is memory related.
Funny you should say that Bindi, i remmeber Tim went through 3 of the EVGA's 680's, and i don't think managed to do a review on it at all, while the board i bought had no problems at all, worked straight away. I found it far more stable than the Striker Extreme i had, and the Striker 2 780i i have now. Sam
You see, like Mankz, all I've ever had to do is flash the bios, or just give it 15-20 minutes to cool down, but I've heard so many other things that just get me worried. By the sounds of it, the nforce 680i is quite the problematic chipset, with a load of people RMAing them... A bit of googling did indeed tell me that the C1 was a memory error, so all I did was switch it off, remove the memory, internal battery and CMOS jumper, leave it while I had lunch, replace them and reboot. Then it was just a case of playing with the BIOS... and all was well But I've heard of others who, like Tim, had sooo many problems with the board that it seems unbelievable that they released it in the first place... When I got mine, it was a soon as it got released, but before the ball got rolling (so it was relatively cheap) which was quite foolish because I should have given them a few months to find the bugs... I think I'll just buy a nice regular Gigabyte or Asus board next time...
The Striker 2 has issues with heat aswell doesn't it? I think in B-T's review it ran its SB very hot when it had cards in SLI on it... Prehaps a ghetto rigged 80mm in in order Sam
680i HERE! its totally the luck of the draw in my experience. I have a BFG board. 1st problem. PCIe slot keeps going weird. Have to occasionally push the gfx card in. 2nd problem. Sata drives kept going weird. Would reboot BSOD at random. (seems OK with bios update) 3rd problem. USB goes ape Sh*t if u try to plug in USB into all ports ( think i have 4 and its ok) 4th problem. 4 gig. Vista 64 goes a bit wobbly trying to install with 4 gig. (seemed ok with SP1?) Part from that im happy. Got a nice overclock on my c2d6600 (3ghz). Anyone tried SLI on this board or will it cause even more probs. running XFX8800GTX?
Frankly telling I don't have any experience with using 680i, but one of my friend telling it has problems with the board.
The whole system is a little warm tbh, the fact the Striker has a huge great heatsink large enough to cut a hole in the side of the Titanic says something about nforce chipsets. The DVD Asus provide with all the drivers also has 2 videos, only watched one, and it showed a board with an optional waterblock that sits on the chipset, but after a little digging, it seems it's for the Maximus Formula, grr EK has a 780i waterblock, but i haven't looked into watercooling the board yet, although, it is a possibility. Sam
680i chipset user here also... from what ive experienced also its been very much luck of the draw with them, they seem to have various bugs and issues, I have been very lucky to have the first one I got in March 2007 still working, however 1 of the first things I did when building the system was to attach a small 40mm fan to the nothbridge to assist cool it down, as I knew it got HOT++. Where as a friend of mine whom used same parts as I did for my build had to go though 3 or 4 boards before he got his working, with various issues 1 locking up due to overheating, others with ram controller issues. Awesome chipset on paper, but in practice, very buggy it seems, specially so if lady luck is not on your side, tomorrow im about to find out how the board likes 8gb ram or not, as I understand the ram controller on them is quite fussy.
