780i vs 680i (revisit?)

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benw17

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Nov 8, 2007
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Hello All [H]

i was wondering, how has peoples experiences been with the 780i with regard to: do the same problems the 680i face exist on the 780i?

Alot of people asked recommendations on the board and were told it would be a bad choice and used the suck-ass reliability of the 680i as example of said bad choice.

Since the 780i uses same material/board with the addition of a new chip added on, i was wondering do the same problems exist?

I know Kyle (motherboard master) said that he saw a couple of problems still and the lack of true support for quad core 1600 fsb... and he would have a review later on but i wanted to see if anyone has posted yet. i looked around and to my amazement not too many people are complaining about the same errors that existed.

So far (in short):

pros:
pci-e 2.0 (not as beneficial yet)
SLI

Cons:
expensive
horrible reputation
 
How certain are you that you're going to use SLI? If you're going to use it, get the newer 780i board. If you're not sure, go with a P35 or X38 board. No sense in taking chances when you're spending that kind of money ;).
 
One of my two 680i boards was fantastic (rock solid, 1800+ FSB). The other was crappy. My 780i board is extremely solid but won't overclock past 1700 MHz. SLI definitely kicks ass, but Crossfire on an Intel chipset seems to be a good alternative option.
 
ive typed it a million times. i had 2 evga ar boards, and 2 evga a1 (quad core oc fixed) boards. none of them had any kind of problem at all, no sata, no raid, no ram, no sound, no instability probs. and that was 4 out of 4. i only swapped to a p35 board because the 680i did not oc the quad very well. now that i am back to dual core (until q9450 at least), i am buying an evga 780i next week. and if the 790i boards ran ddr2, i would be buyng one of them next month also.
 
I'm on my 2nd 680i A1 board, and just counting the time until it eventually fries, then i'll just rma it and buy a 780i board. I havent heard anything near as bad with the 780 as the 680s.
 
vanilla_guerilla said:
ive typed it a million times. i had 2 evga ar boards, and 2 evga a1 (quad core oc fixed) boards. none of them had any kind of problem at all, no sata, no raid, no ram, no sound, no instability probs. and that was 4 out of 4. i only swapped to a p35 board because the 680i did not oc the quad very well. now that i am back to dual core (until q9450 at least), i am buying an evga 780i next week. and if the 790i boards ran ddr2, i would be buyng one of them next month also.
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I've seen you type it a lot...not sure if it's a million though :p.
 
Well I won't bother recounting the totality of my 680i SLI experiences. I'm sure a quick search will lead you to my many rants on the subject. In short I think the 680i SLI reference boards are terrible. I have owned 11 of them and only one survived more than a month. That board has actually run now for one year without failure or instability and the north bridge temps are reasonable. I've got an E6600 overclocked to 3.2GHz and this machine gets used regularly but not all the time. The other 10 boards died for various reasons one of which died due to an accident. Fair enough, I'll give that one a pass. In my experiences with the 680i SLI boards I've concluded that their power subsystem is poorly designed or simply inadequate. The chipsets are poorly cooled and after running too hot for a month or two they tend to fry and take your RAM with them. I've even water cooled several of these boards (including the VREG) and even that wasn't enough to stave off death. Even the mighty EVGA 680i SLI Black Pearl Edition burned up on me. Even with water cooling the north bridge temperatures were out of control. This tells me that components are likely being over volted even at stock or automatic settings on several of these boards. So cooling alone will not solve the problems these boards have.

Non-reference 680i SLI boards are a mixed bag. They tend to not overclock as well as their reference board counterparts but they have horrible memory compatibility problems and cooling issues of their own. So far I think the P5N32-E SLI and Striker Extreme were the best of these boards even though they started out as two of the worst. Once ASUS got the BIOS' in good shape for their boards everything but memory compatibility and overclocking have been solved. Overclocking however has been dramatically improved in recent BIOS versions for both boards. So good news there. If you do decide to go with a 680i SLI board due to being more mature than the 780i SLI boards then the P5N32-E SLI is your BEST bet. The Striker Extreme is great too and has an awesome set of features. Unfortunately you will pay out the ass for them.

I'll also say ahead of time that if you are certainly going SLI you have but one option unless you want to spring for the Intel D5400XS and a pair of Xeon CPUs. That option is getting a 780i SLI chipset based board.

Now on the subject of reference 780i SLI chipset based boards I have some experience of my own. Kyle didn't exactly give those a glowing recommendation, but the EVGA board gave Morry no real issues as evidenced in his comments during his review. I used the same board Kyle did with a QX9770 CPU for the Skulltrail article and it was ok but I had a couple of random reboots and a hard lock or two. Basically it freaked out two or three times for no apparent reason. I didn't review the board in question but I did use the 780i SLI test system for several hours doing the real-world game testing for comparison to Skulltrail. The 780i SLI reference boards do work so far, and they are usable. I am however quite concerned that these boards will suffer from the same short life span the 680i SLI boards did. The voltage design and cooling is just so similar to the 680i SLI boards it almost seems as though NVIDIA learned NOTHING from their experiences.

EVGA is working on a revamped version of the board called the EVGA 780i SLI FTW Edition. This board has a proper 8-Phase power design and solid caps. This could be the best board out of all the 780i SLI boards that have been or will ever be. We don't know yet and won't know until it is released. The nice thing is that if you buy a 780i SLI reference board from EVGA you can step-up to the FTW when it is released. That right there makes the 780i SLI reference board from EVGA tempting.

Right now the two ASUS 780i SLI boards suck. They can't be recommended at present. Now bear in mind that I have no personal experience with these boards but I know others that do. (Kyle being one of them.) Kyle has made enough comments in the forums about the P5N-T and Striker II Formula that were negative enough for me to recommend against them at present. They've got good layouts and the hardware seems decent, but until they resolve some BIOS and or driver issues, I'd say stay away until this changes. If history repeats itself these boards will mature nicely and they'll be a good option. This might however take months like it did for the Striker Extreme and P5N32-E SLI. So if you go with these boards expect teething issues.

I have no experience with the MSI 780i SLI board. I can't comment on it. I also didn't use their 680i SLI chipset based board, so I can't even make an educated guess about how good their 780i SLI board is. So I won't.

All in all the 780i SLI chipset based boards do not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. I wonder how I'll feel about them a year from now. How I felt about the 680i SLI boards 14 months ago in now way echoes how I feel about them now, so it will be interesting to see what happens over the next few months.
 
vengence said:
Any thoughts on the XFX 780i Dan?
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It is exactly the same board as the EVGA version. Those are both reference designs and they are both built in the same factory under contract for NVIDIA. After NVIDIA receives them they sell them to the various board companies for branding and re-sale.

There is no difference between the two except the differences between the packaging and the companies backing them.
 
Dan_D said:
EVGA is working on a revamped version of the board called the EVGA 780i SLI FTW Edition. This board has a proper 8-Phase power design and solid caps. This could be the best board out of all the 780i SLI boards that have been or will ever be. We don't know yet and won't know until it is released. The nice thing is that if you buy a 780i SLI reference board from EVGA you can step-up to the FTW when it is released. That right there makes the 780i SLI reference board from EVGA tempting.
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evga has been doing great the past few years. i am suprised that they would issue a "fuck the world" edition.
 
I'm starting to see more info around the net on the MSI board -- no full reviews yet, but more posts from users here and at other forums. Unlike the ASUS boards or the reference boards (XFX and EVGA,) impressions so far on the P7N Diamond have been uniformly positive.

Like the ASUS boards, the P7N Diamond is not a reference design. It features a better PWM system (which also differs from the ASUS 8 stage CPU and 2 stage memory design) and it has better capacitors as well. Also, unique to this board is a fourth PCI-E x16 lane, two E-SATA ports, and an extra internal PATA port. I also like that they've included an X-Fi PCI-E x1 card for on-board sound. I don't think it's as good as Creative's mid-range retail models, but it should be better than ASUS's solution or the on-board Realtek chip on the reference boards.

The most surprising thing I've seen is that two or three users have been able to get their board to bench with a 580mhz FSB (paired with a dual core.) This obviously isn't saying too much about what can be achieved at stable settings, but I sure haven't seen a nForce board get that high before. The other encouraging thing I've read is that the chipset does seem to run cooler than on other 780i boards, although it probably still runs quite hot (the board does use passive cooling.)

I'd be very interested in seeing a full-fledged review of this board soon. Again, there is still very little info out there, and the impressions so far are few, but the fact that they've been positive has me interested.
 
Dan_D said:
EVGA is working on a revamped version of the board called the EVGA 780i SLI FTW Edition. This board has a proper 8-Phase power design and solid caps. This could be the best board out of all the 780i SLI boards that have been or will ever be. We don't know yet and won't know until it is released. The nice thing is that if you buy a 780i SLI reference board from EVGA you can step-up to the FTW when it is released. That right there makes the 780i SLI reference board from EVGA tempting.
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I'm not so sure you'll be able to step up to the FTW edition. EVGA has said that it's strictly a limited run board, much like the Black Pearl (although it shouldn't cost as much as the chipset cooling is significantly simpler.) Also, EVGA does not usually offer step-ups on motherboards to my knowledge. The 780i step up was a special case due to the 680i Yorkfield issue.
 
Markyip1 said:
I'm not so sure you'll be able to step up to the FTW edition. EVGA has said that it's strictly a limited run board, much like the Black Pearl (although it shouldn't cost as much as the chipset cooling is significantly simpler.) Also, EVGA does not usually offer step-ups on motherboards to my knowledge. The 780i step up was a special case due to the 680i Yorkfield issue.
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The 780i SLI EVGA boards advertise the step up program on the front of the box. Again, EVGA hasn't really announced anything.
 
kirbyrj said:
Will it be released within the 90 day window?
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1) if he knew something why would he be sitting on it.
2) if he knew something and he had a reason to sit on it why would he suddenly stop sitting on it because you asked?
3) Seriously???
4) I know you probably don't know if it is common knowledge when it's coming out and thats fine however maybe you should have read the part where he said " Again, EVGA hasn't really announced anything." You know, that little piece you quoted?

Sorry, just having some good natured fun at your expense, hope you can take it as that ^^:D
 
vengence said:
1) if he knew something why would he be sitting on it.
2) if he knew something and he had a reason to sit on it why would he suddenly stop sitting on it because you asked?
3) Seriously???
4) I know you probably don't know if it is common knowledge when it's coming out and thats fine however maybe you should have read the part where he said " Again, EVGA hasn't really announced anything." You know, that little piece you quoted?

Sorry, just having some good natured fun at your expense, hope you can take it as that ^^:D
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Well, I know that they haven't announced anything, but anything can happen in 3 months :)...especially since it's not a new chipset, it's just a different revision of the board. But I'll take it as good natured fun...as long as you do the same when I point out that you spelled vengeance wrong in your user name :p :D.
 
Any opinions on the 750i chipset, and if the ASUS P5N-D and/or the MSI P7N SLI Platinum (the only 750i motherboards I know of) are any good?

Nice to finally see a midrange SLI chipset that doesn't need the annoying paddle board switch, and PCI-E 2.0 means that the 8x on it is as fast as the 16x on my P35 board. :) If I do get a large monitor before Nehalem and DDR3 come of age, I might be tempted to upgrade to it.
 
No disrespect, but with the 790i on the horizon does the 780i really have any value even with FTW?
 
From a feature perspective, I will never make use of anything a 780i board provides over the 680i. I certainly won't be using a 3rd graphics card nor do I ever have plans to plug-in a Yorkfield quad.

However, if one of the new 780i boards proves to be stable and solid, and is furthermore an easy and capable overclocker, then I will upgrade. The reference 680i boards OC well, but I have very little confidence in their long-term reliability and stability. On the other hand, many non-reference 680i boards have proven to be rock-solid over the long term, but have severe memory capability issues and can't OC well at all. If there is a 780i board that will provide the best of both worlds, than an upgrade to it wold be most worthwhile.
 
jstenuf said:
No disrespect, but with the 790i on the horizon does the 780i really have any value even with FTW?
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Supposedly the 790i SLI chipset will be DDR3 only. If that is true then the 780i SLI certainly will have some value for some.
 
kirbyrj said:
Well, I know that they haven't announced anything, but anything can happen in 3 months :)...especially since it's not a new chipset, it's just a different revision of the board. But I'll take it as good natured fun...as long as you do the same when I point out that you spelled vengeance wrong in your user name :p :D.
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I've allways taken that as good natured, because it was intentional. It comes from a character name I have in FFXI. The correct spelling was taken but not being used (talked to the person who had it, but he only used it for a mule but was too lazy to give up the name:mad:) so i just took the misspelled name and used it. Sad thing though it your only the second person to actually say something about. Guess either most people are too nice, or too dumb to realize :D
 
So far it has not given me any trouble. I had all kinds of problems with my eVGA 680i SLI.
 
Dan_D,

I'm a little confused by what you wrote here:

I'll also say ahead of time that if you are certainly going SLI you have but one option unless you want to spring for the Intel D5400XS and a pair of Xeon CPUs. That option is getting a 780i SLI chipset based board.
I am a noob here, but doesn't the P5N32-E offer SLI? If this is such a fantastic board, why is the 780i chipset necessary for SLI?

Thanks,
Raz
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Razmo said:
Dan_D,

I'm a little confused by what you wrote here:

I'll also say ahead of time that if you are certainly going SLI you have but one option unless you want to spring for the Intel D5400XS and a pair of Xeon CPUs. That option is getting a 780i SLI chipset based board.

I am a noob here, but doesn't the P5N32-E offer SLI? If this is such a fantastic board, why is the 780i chipset necessary for SLI?

Thanks,
Raz
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Well I don't mention the P5N32-E SLI because it doesn't offer 45nm quad core support. If it did I'd mention it and the Striker Extreme. The 780i SLI boards offer quad core 45nm CPU support. That will be what the bulk of enthusiasts start going for once they are released.
 
Dan_D said:
Razmo said:
Dan_D,

I'm a little confused by what you wrote here:

I'll also say ahead of time that if you are certainly going SLI you have but one option unless you want to spring for the Intel D5400XS and a pair of Xeon CPUs. That option is getting a 780i SLI chipset based board.

Well I don't mention the P5N32-E SLI because it doesn't offer 45nm quad core support. If it did I'd mention it and the Striker Extreme. The 780i SLI boards offer quad core 45nm CPU support. That will be what the bulk of enthusiasts start going for once they are released.
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I see, thanks! My plan has been the EVGA 780i, but now it may be best to wait for the revision...

Raz
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Have been a bit disappointed by my striker II formula. Firstly it's passive chipset cooling is not fit for purpose. In a well ventilated stacker the NB can hover around 65C at stock voltages - push this up to 1.5V and your board will auto-shutdown to spare chipset damage. Surely asus should have realised people were going to overclock these boards so their decision to go with passive cooling is pretty hard to understand.

From what I have seen air cooling is not enough and it looks like water cooling is the best approach to these boards.
 
morkboy_wonder said:
Have been a bit disappointed by my striker II formula. Firstly it's passive chipset cooling is not fit for purpose. In a well ventilated stacker the NB can hover around 65C at stock voltages - push this up to 1.5V and your board will auto-shutdown to spare chipset damage. Surely asus should have realised people were going to overclock these boards so their decision to go with passive cooling is pretty hard to understand.

From what I have seen air cooling is not enough and it looks like water cooling is the best approach to these boards.
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Same thing here.

Running 56°c with stock voltage on the Striker II... and a Cosmos box.

I was thinking going water colling on it, but i can't find the right parts for it...
 
I've had nothing but good luck with my "production" 680i, stable so far with no lock ups or random shutdown/reboots. I bought a second one and a capacitor was broken when it was packaged at the factory, got it RMA'd and it's sitting, still sealed, waiting for the step-up/upgrade to the 780i. I hope the do offer a step-up to the "F the World" version (as someone else put it) as I'll byte....
 
Ced-G60 said:
I was thinking going water colling on it, but i can't find the right parts for it...
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I have read on the asus forum that EK have some blocks in the pipelinehttp://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20080215181436781&board_id=1&model=Striker+II+Formula&page=1&SLanguage=en-us. I think the addition of the PCI-E chip has meant they have to make from from scratch. I have read some guys have cooled the NB with a standard water block ad just stuck an additional heat sink on the new chip with good results. From what I remember the cosmos has intakes for watertubes so reckon you should get on fine.
 
Ok..i have personally owned both the eVGA 680i a1 and now i own the eVGA780i. The -only- two reasons i upgraded to the new 780i board was because the 680i would NOT support my QX9650, and i did not mind paying $130 for the step-up. I have NO problems with my eVGA 680i, and i even had it running an e6600 under phase change. rock solid OC'er for me. I was able to hit 3.6 with no hiccup at all. But that is my -personal- experience, and as always YMMV :)
 
yes e6600, try that with one of the 1333fsb stock chips, or a quad, over time, and then come back and see how long it lasts.
 
sd11 said:
yes e6600, try that with one of the 1333fsb stock chips, or a quad, over time, and then come back and see how long it lasts.
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While many people swear that quad core CPUs accelerate the demise of the 680i SLI boards, I can't say there is conclusive proof that this is true. However I am inclined to think that it is true as that has been my experience.
 
thanks to all those who replied, after lurking around various forums, support forums, and review sites.. here is what i found:

MOST people - liked the 780i Because it supports new processors BUT felt it was a rip off.

Many people still think that the 780i has reliability issues and are still "waiting to see".

As for me, i got a sweet deal on a pair of 3870 + e8400. since im building a case and re-doing the whole system i will gladly wait for the asus p5..

Once again thanks all.
 
Good luck to you in your new build! I think you'll be happy since -you- made the choice, not one of us :)
 
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