Friend has a problem regardign QX9650 bios

He has a
Asus Striker with qx9650

He gets an error message when self test start at the begining, saying uknown cpu update bios to get full power. He's running latest bios aswell 1305

Your "friend" didn't do his homework. The QX9650 doesn't work on the 6 series boards, only the new 7 series (780i, and 790i in Q1/2008).

I'm not entirely sure, but I think there's a beta BIOS going around for the 45nm processors on your board, not sure where to find it. The next BIOS is supposed to support dual core 45's anyways.

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=167016

This says that the 680i Striker only supports dual core 45nm processors.

Nvidia and Intel are having some issues with the quad core CPUs and the 680i chipset. Apparently some changes were made to the retail CPUs which were not made in the engineering samples nvidia tested with.

There's a lot of speculation of what's going on between nvidia and Intel, especially about sli licensing for intel and yorkfield data for nvidia.

But the conclusion is the 680i chipset will not support quad core. It will however support dual core penryn.

Although I have a suspicion that in terms of hardware the 680i is very capable of supporting quad core (it was announced by various distributors such as asus, evga, etc). Personally I think nvidia is hiding something and is really just passing on the cost to the consumer (basically having the penryn quad cores segway the sales of their new 7xx series chipset).

The worst part about all this is the 780i is nothing special, it's simply a 680i chip with an additional chip to support 3 pci-e slots for triple sli.

I thought it was the 680i cpu voltage regulation that won't handle the current draw reliably. For that matter, they weren't all that great handling the kentsfields.