eVGA 680i motherboard

[danzgpgt97]

I believe the Infinity supports Quad-core CPU's. ..there goes that edge

 

Ouch, I guess its just more expensive.:eek2:

[ICON57]

i have used my evga mobo since its release on nov 8th, and havent had any of the probs i have read about...luck of the draw for me i guess.

i got rid of the asus ws pro, to me that board was horrible...but yet others have no issues and love it....

...on a side note, i have heard very good thing about intels bad axe2

[Guest ElAguila]

Everything is set to come in today. After reading some of the reviews I am starting to have second thoughts about going with the E6400 instead of the E6600. Most of the reviews I have read show this msi board of not being stable past 350fsb. With the divider on this cpu I need 375 to hit 3GHz. I may end up going with a different board and using one of my pci sata controllers again. But until I see what I can do I will reserve judgement. I used the money I saved from going with an E6400 to get the Supertalent T800UX2GC4 memory. If things go bad I can always try this board:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16813131032

[Magel]

The 680i seems to be a matter of luck

 

Built my rig yesterday, every thing went fine, booted up first go with no problems.....First thing I did was flash to the new BIOS and installed the water cooling today, fingers crossed I dont have any problems with this board but its early days !!!!!

[Nehil]

Got mine, only checked it once so that it works, borrowed some ram and a g-card from a friend. Booted up fine and stuff like that. Seems like a lot of people don't really know what they are talking about here, since they don't even have the card. Also this review among others shows that it is a great card.

[Coors]

You can read about the problems with the 680i on many forums and as said by others it is pretty much hit or miss. So to say that just because yours works that everyone else doesn't know what their talking about is stupid. Especially since some pretty knowledgeable people have posted in this thread.

[Magel]

Here are some pics of my rig....

 

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Desktop

 

The raidiator was the hardest part to install...back of the case was unsuitable so had to mount it in the front. Used some parts from my old water cooling setup to mount it......

[choke.]

this thread seems to be dying but i just felt i should add this just in case anyone is still following it. i got all the stuff for my new build yesterday, except for a new case which i was going to just go pick up at frys. due to both a bit lof laziness and also not wanting to disrupt my desk (was planning on getting a stacker) i just decided last minute to blow it off and just keep my old faithful lian-li. i actually went into this fully prepared for problems so i took a little extra time during the installation to make sure i didnt make any mistakes. i also spent a good amount of time at the evga forums beforehand so i was prepared for some of the issues that may have come up. so far everything has gone really, really well and my machine is running great. i initially had some trouble getting my sata storage drives to show up, and currently im leaving one out of the mix. 4 should be enough for now. im not an EXTREEEM oc'er, im the guy who figures out what things are supposed to run at, and then just pushes the envelope just a little. i havent started that just yet but its just around the corner. i know some people have been having loads of problems but i really wanted to have a c2d board with sli and this, to me, seemed to be my best option. i hoped for the best and things seemed to work out.

hopefully it will stay that way, we will see what happens when i start installing games and a ton of programs.

[Slammy]

I built my eVga 680i setup using a e6600 and 2gb kit of OCZ Platinum rev 2 about a week ago and all is well. Sure i had a few quirks gettin it running but i always have that when building a new computer and unless youre really impatient or dont know what youre doing it should be easy to figure out. Not saying that some boards dont have problems but ive read WAY too many complaints from people that admit its their first build and they classy lady about not being able to throw it together and hit 3.6ghz. Couple of things i did, first off i flashed by BIOS the old school way with a floppy ( that windows BIOS flashing scares the hell out of me, besides you want the BIOS problems fixed BEFORE you install a single thing on it). Second, i pulled all the heatsinks off, scrapped that goo off and found out that it was not making contact hardly at all on any of them. So i put some normal thermal gease on there, didnt even use AS5, just regular stuff. I did have one big problem with the memory and that was related to which memory slots i used and my timings. When first built it i had read about problems with the blue memory slots so i used the black ones. Well at some point i switched my memory around to the blue ones and instantly had all kinds of memory related problems. Thinking it had screwed my memory i started doing alot of testing with MEMTEST to discover that it was indeed the blue slots that were causing me to get errors. Once i switched my memory back to the black slots everying was fine. I still had alittle bit of stability problems which i discovered something about DDR2 being designed to run at 2T? I didnt get this and had been trying to run mine at 1T. The OCZ guys told me that unless it is stated, all their DDR2 runs at 2T. That was a oversite on MY part cause i didnt research enough, NOT the boards fault. I also had to make sure i bumped my memory voltage up to 2v. So now i have a screamer @ 3.6ghz memory is running at 850mhz which it may do more but i havent messed with it since. My load temps are under 55c and it cooled by a ThermalRight Ultra-120 in a LiLian v-1000 Plus 2 case. The ONLY remaining problem i am having is with the PS/2 keyboard port. That is a real pain the butt cause when im trying to play a game it will beep and the keys stick in the game. I am hoping for a fix but i think i might just order a USB keyboard and be done with it. I have heard this is fixed in current versions of the board. Overall, sure this board has some quirks and a learning curve but nothing i havent had to deal with before. My old DFI Ultra-D was the same damn way and once i learned to work WITH the board instead of how i WANTED it to, i was able to get a extremely fast AMD setup going.

[Oceanborn]

Angry the DS3 doesn't have a second pci slot. But the DQ6 does. just fyi

 

Yes it does...Gigabyte released a revision 2.0 of this board that is a different layout...including a second 16x PCIex slot (4x electrically)....

[Magel]

Couple of things i did, first off i flashed by BIOS the old school way with a floppy ( that windows BIOS flashing scares the hell out of me, besides you want the BIOS problems fixed BEFORE you install a single thing on it).

 

I personally dont like using floppys, the only thing I will use them for is installing RAID drivers. I flash my BIOS with a Usb Flash drive and if I knew how to install RAID drivers with a flash drive id throw the floppy drive in the bin......

 

Had a problem installing Windows XP a while back, would get to the part where I had to install 3rd party drivers, they appeared to load fine and as soon as it got to the windows setup part, it said it couldnt detect any hard drives, after much trouble shooting on a hunch checked the floppy and the files had become corrupt....reformated it and windows installed fine afterwards...Wont trust a floppy with anything more than RAID drivers now.....

 

edit : Did some google'ing. It appears you can install RAID drivers from a flash drive in Vista when re-installing but not in XP....

[raju]

yeah give the 680i a little more time. The 965 could be the chipset of choice this year if Intel decide to let is go out in it's full glory. It's cheap too, as the boards are good value (cost wise) and do everything you could ask of a 24/7 rig. I see nothing else that offers so much in general, with the 650i perhaps getting a look in if it works well. The next 2 boards that will hit the shelves force the 1066 strap with the abit pipping clock for clock speed at this time, though the bios is immature atm, which needs to be considered for a 24/7 system.

 

 

Moving up the scale farther into the enthusiast sector the good 975 boards are still prefered for most number crunching and 3d performance clock for clock. Only upshot for high/hard/max clocking with 975 chipsets, is the default chipset latency is adjusted according to the default multiplier, meaning that moving the multi up results in a lower capable fsb and you end up at the same max cpu mhz. Now for the lower end conroe's on lower default multi's this works real well, as you have virtually the full range of fsb at your disposal. For a 24/7 system you can't beat 975/965 performance or reliability at sensible clocks. Couple that with power savings of c1e/speedstep and you have a nice energy efficient pc, (something we ignore at times, I come back to stock for everyday browsing etc, no need for the extra consumption for nothing, cmos reloaded is great for that and all boards that oc should have the function imo from a greener planet angle). My nephew is working on putting together low cost servers with semprons for ultra low power draw, a great step forwards for government agencies where low power consumption is embraced as long as performance is adequate for the task at hand..

 

 

regards

Raja