anyone runing the eVGA 680i board in here? If so, come on in.

I just built my E6600 setup with my eVGA 680i board and I was wondering what kind of O/Cing results people are getting with this board?

please post if you have this combo so I can get a good idea of what to expect.

There is a whole post about this in the Conroe overclocking database in the Intel Processor forums, but I will indulge you.

E6600 on a 680i:
FSB: 400mhz
RAM: 800mhz, 4-4-4-10-1T
Multi: 8x
Vcore: 1.30

Total OC (stable for weeks now): 3.2ghz. I could get 3.5 to 3.6, but it requires more voltage than I am willing to give the chip for the extra mhz.

There's a ton of threads on this already. But having said that, everything you need to know about overclocking this board is in the nvidia overclocking guide for the 680i. Pay especially close attention to the recommended voltages.

Link to Guide

Rebels Haven has a whole sector devoted to the EVGA 680i. Check out the "Tips, Bugs, and Workarounds" sticky. The BIOS screen shots helped me go right to 9x400 on the 1st boot:

nVidia 680i Reference Board Forum

I found this thread trying to find out how far people are overclocking there e6600's, but not much luck so far, so I may as well post my results. I spent about an hour last night trying to overclock my e6600 on my evga 680i, and with the drastic change in bios from my lanparty 865pe I found my self wondering what to do with so many options. I really don't do much pc gaming anymore, but you could say that I'm a power user. I have got 3 17" LCD's and a 32" LCD HDTV @720p running all of the time on two evga 7600GT cards, all on DVI. I have a set of WD Raptors in raid 0 to speed dvd ripping, but ultimately move the files to my HTPC for viewing on my 65" Mits. I splurged on the SLI ram, just to find that I should've bought the Dominator modules instead (water cool-able). So anyway, I managed to get my e6600 running at 3.428 Ghz with the memory linked to around 1016Mhz. I found some settings for the pci reference clocks, and seeing as how I don't give a crap about games, I locked them at 100Mhz on each. I stopped pushing it when I got a BSOD at roughly 3.5Ghz, however I never raised the voltage from stock on anything. That means that I got a full 1.0 Ghz overclock on stock voltages and stock air cooling. It's been my experience that with a good PSU you won't have to raise voltages as much, because of the more accurate, stable, and clean power.

eVGA 680i SLI
intel Core 2 Duo e6600 2.4 Ghz processor, running @ 3.428 Ghz at stock voltage(whatever that is).
2x eVGA 7600 GT Cards running independant of each other ( 4 monitors)
2x 1GB OCZ SLI memory running at around 1016Mhz with divider
1x 160GB Maxtor ATA-133 IDE (System Drive-WinXP Home)
2x 36GB Western Digital Raptor 10,000 rpm SATA-150 in RAID 0 (Performance/Gaming Drive).
Enermax NoiseTaker II 600W PSU with active PFC
and one NEC DVD-RW IDE Drive.
Everything is AIR COOLED, with stock intel heatsink.

Anyway, it's completely stable so far, but I haven't been able to stress test it yet. I will not push it though, because at the moment I can underclock it and still be bottlenecked by my hard drive. I'm waiting to see OEM pricing on Vista, before I upgrade to a faster Hard Drive RAID set( 0 or 5) for my system drive.

Everybody PLEASE POST YOUR OC RESULTS !

I thought I might mention that I had stability and heat issues early on, even before I overclocked it, just because I had my case in the corner and it kept recurculating the hot air back in. Once I pulled it out a few extra inches, it's been fine, even overclocked.

PLEASE POST YOUR OC RESULTS !

well, here's what I'm getting so far from my E6600 - eVGA 680i combo on air cooling:

I like this board, I'm not an overclocker, but i might try. However 2 of the 4 header fans won't work. My 2 6800GT's won't work in SLI. I called Evga tech support, and upgraded the Bios to the P24 (by the way, easiest Bios upgrading system i've ever used). That didn't work. Called back, the new tech sent me an email with the P21 Bios, he stayed on the phone while i flashed (through windows-which was easy too), [they seem to have their shit together], and that didn't work, so he suggested RMAing the board, which New Egg will do. I noticed that Nvidia's ActiveArmor firewall didn't seem to be there on this 680i board, anyone else notice that?

SLI has never worked on my evga 680i board either. First thing I did was update the bios to the one on evga's page advertising the sata corruption fix. When the system actually failed to crash during some 3D app, benchmark scores were identical to the scores it got with one card taken out. Most of the time though, it would just fucking crash. I have a pc power and cooling 750 watt quad, which is on the 8800gtx sli recommended psu list. I'm running 8800gtx sli along with an audigy 4 pro (maybe a bad combo with the 680i chipset).

I think the 680is are just complete junk; I also own an asus p5n32-e sli board (SLI doesn't work here either!) and it's doing the same shit (with the 0602 bios on it). I think I'll test each 8800gtx for a few days in a dfi nforce 4 board with an opteron that has been rock solid through it's entire time in my ownership. If there's no problems with the 8800s, I have NOTHING left to blame but the 680i chipsets on both my likely defective $300 mobos that belong in the fucking garbage can.


EDIT: I thought I'd toss in my ram specs if anyone is reading this and thinking it's some kind of ram problem. I'm using 2 gb of corsair dominator PC2-8500, with timings set to 5-5-5-12-2T as per the specs, and a vdimm of 2.2v. The ram passes the built-in memtest on my p5n32-e sli, which I have run during each post (maybe 2 dozen now).

I've played with different combos on my e6600 and evga 680i, and have pretty much settled for 3.6ghz as an all around oc with the best temps to performance ratio. My temps might be on the conservative side but, as ambient temps increase I want to have a nice 10-15c of headroom. I've gotten mine to run as high as 3.9ghz stable, but it requires me pumping much more voltage into it, and for the gain to be had it's not worth it to me. The temps just start to sky rocket past the 1.4 to 1.5v mark. That and the fact that the e6600 is locked at 9x multi, and I want to keep it from booting off the 1333 strap for memory bandwidth reasons. I had my superPI times actually decrease just by increasing the fsb past a certain point. Somewhere around 420-425mhz I believe the evga 680i starts using the 1333 strap. Correct me if I'm wrong.

My EVGA 680i is running flawlessly on P23 BIOS

I have my air cooled E6400 running at a peppy 3.3GHz !! (1.4v) load temp: 51C
DDR2 unlocked at 850MHz 5-5-5-12

Running on Windows Vista x64 RC2, oh btw I'm running NVMonitor in Vista it works!! I was going out of my mind trying to find a cpu monitor application, coretemp, speedfan, everest, none worked in vista 64-bit. Finally I tried NTune with NVmonitor, bam, got my temps!

Love the EVGA board.

I'm running stable at the current config at 30 degrees stationary, and up to 45 under heavy use. Voltage FSB is 1.5. My 3dmark06 was 10k+ and the CPU rating was at 2900ish.

No problems so far (fingers crossed). Memory and GPU overclock is next....once I figure out enough of what and how to do it.

No problems with OC'ing once I flashed to P23, normal settings are in my sig.
OC'ing has been dreamy, e6400 can reach 3.7 orthos stable for about 6 hours on air before it kicks back an error-- just need to nudge in a few more degrees of cooling

I replaced the stock NB and SB with a shorter and wider heatsink to allow my scythe to mount with the fans blowing through horizontally in push/pull rather than a single fan vertically blowing up - this helped.

you guys who are OCing...besides the CPU cooling, have y'all added any additional cooling like to the mobo? I'm curious what idle and load temps y'all are getting for the mobo.


I'm really curious about TigerTank in particular, especially with what his RAM timings are set at. I want to try the same thing. problem is I don't think he posts here anymore

My EVGA 680i died earlier this week, the rma replacement arrived today and it lasted an hour. This board overclocks well (got my X6800 to 4ghz on water), sli has always worked for me, but in the end this board just wasn't ready to be released.

See my rig...I have been very happy, none of the original problems with the chipset. I lose stablity if I push the overclock more...not so much in day to day use but if I run a stresstest or hours of oblivion I get crashed if I push fsb or ram beyond my sig.