Says you, I built well over 50 systems using the 680i chipsets, over 40 are still in use today by the kids of the people i built them for and to this day not a single issue has come from them. Hell even my own 680i eVGA board is still screaming down in my basement with my Q6600 at 3.6 on water. no hiccups, no issues. Now, this is largely because I custom installed the chipset driver and never used Nvidia's sata controller software. that 1 thing made all the difference.
Now what should be #1 is any fucking POS motherboard that use VIA for a chipset. reverse engineered AGP slots, half assed drivers. Hell even right up until MS EOL'd XP, if you called up tech support for help with your XP machine, if you were running ANY driver for the via chipset outside of what shipped with XP, they would hang up on you.
Says Kyle, and says me.
I will wager those boards are running dual-core CPU's or quads at stock clocks. My half dozen 680i boards killed in the line of duty along with half a dozen DOA replacements, with probably 10 more dead ones in friend's systems tells me they were shit.
Even non-reference 680i SLI boards were terrible. The chipset was bad. The base BIOS code from NVIDIA was no doubt partially responsible for their failure rates. I saw a ton of P5N32-SLI motherboards and their variants die similar deaths. Even the two Striker Extremes I had shit the bed on me.
They are terrible boards. They earned the top spot on this list for a damn good reason. At lest the FIC VA503+ has the excuse of being cheap. The 680i SLI motherboards were designed to be the best in their time but had a track record that makes any ECS or PCChips model look good.
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