VERY frustrated with my EVGA 680i mobo

v6maro

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Oct 10, 2002
Messages
1,552
Ok, I know this mobo is old, but I wasn't intending to upgrade until the fall for BF3. I have the model: 122-CK-NF68-T1. About 1yr ago, I was experiencing some odd issues, anytime I loaded up any 3D game, the game would freeze after a few minutes and I would notice a garbled screen and an audible noise from my headphones. I did a lot of testing with my buddies PC at the time, tested cpu, ram, vid card,hard drives, PSU, EVERYTHING checked out fine except the mobo. I then decided to contact EVGA, worked with them a bit as I was out of warranty.

Well......guess what just started happening tonight....the same f'n garbled screens...ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

So, I don't want to upgrade *yet*. Should I just go on ebay and pick up another one of these poopers or is there another inexpensive motherboard option for me?

oh yeah, btw, since I RMA'd it, I haven't OC'd it at all. FAIL.

Thanks.
:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:
Steve
 
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if you have changed everything, then its the board,

you always ask on the forum to buy a cheap 775 sli board, or if you want other 680i board. or just look on the forum for a sli board.
 
Unfortunately, the 680i and 780i boards were, quite frankly "shit".

They suffered from a whole range of problems, which you are experiencing now.

If you have any luck, you can RMA it again, but most likely you are SOL.

Time to upgrade, sorry.
 
The T1 boards should pretty much all be out of warranty now. You really need to replace it. If you must have a NVIDIA chipset based board for the LGA775 socket processors then I'd advise going with an EVGA 750SLI FTW. It's by far the best LGA775 SLI compatible board in existence. That doesn't say much I'm afraid, I believe the silicon was ultimately flawed. Most of the boards are based on their reference designs which fell short in a number of areas, namely the voltage hardware. Though the FTW boards resolve that issue, the rest of the issues still remain. Mainly, the absolutely abysmal BIOS.

In my experience, NVIDIA chipset based boards are total shit.

The casualties in my war with trying to maintain SLI compatibility on the LGA775 platform are as follows:
  • 12 EVGA 680i SLI boards (6, DOA, both hardware revisions and a Black Pearl)
  • 1 ASUS 680i SLI board
  • 1 ASUS 780i SLI board
  • 1 EVGA 790SLI Ultra board
Trust me, these boards are a soggy shit sandwich, which has been frozen, thawed out, frozen and thawed out again, then microwaved to slushy perfection with a side of used urinal cakes.

I have a EVGA 680i been running perfect for 4+ years...

Let me guess, moderate to no overclocking and only a dual core CPU? With or without SLI?
 
The T1 boards should pretty much all be out of warranty now. You really need to replace it. If you must have a NVIDIA chipset based board for the LGA775 socket processors then I'd advise going with an EVGA 750SLI FTW. It's by far the best LGA775 SLI compatible board in existence. That doesn't say much I'm afraid, I believe the silicon was ultimately flawed. Most of the boards are based on their reference designs which fell short in a number of areas, namely the voltage hardware. Though the FTW boards resolve that issue, the rest of the issues still remain. Mainly, the absolutely abysmal BIOS.

In my experience, NVIDIA chipset based boards are total shit.

The casualties in my war with trying to maintain SLI compatibility on the LGA775 platform are as follows:
  • 12 EVGA 680i SLI boards (6, DOA, both hardware revisions and a Black Pearl)
  • 1 ASUS 680i SLI board
  • 1 ASUS 780i SLI board
  • 1 EVGA 790SLI Ultra board
Trust me, these boards are a soggy shit sandwich, which has been frozen, thawed out, frozen and thawed out again, then microwaved to slushy perfection with a side of used urinal cakes.



Let me guess, moderate to no overclocking and only a dual core CPU? With or without SLI?

Thanks for the info. I just want something to tide me over until the fall...so the crappy BIOS im ok with ... for now. Just looking for something to game on (bfbc2/css) that will be stable until october - is this an EVGA issue or an nvidia chipset issue?

btw on this rma'd board, q6600, no oc, single vid card.
 
Thanks for the info. I just want something to tide me over until the fall...so the crappy BIOS im ok with ... for now. Just looking for something to game on (bfbc2/css) that will be stable until october - is this an EVGA issue or an nvidia chipset issue?

btw on this rma'd board, q6600, no oc, single vid card.

This is really related to the chipset itself. There are numerous different ways these boards don't quite work right. There are small glitches here and there, but also ultimately an untimely death. I had an Asus 780i board once and it was the worst motherboard I have ever owned. It would randomly cause artifacting, I nearly tore my hair out trying to figure out what was wrong with my video card, until I googled the problem and found out it was a common for the chipset. Also, my usb and network ports would randomly stop working. I have seen these issues crop up on just about every manufacturer's nvidia boards. If I had to have something to hold me over and I did not need SLI, I would look for a intel board at this point P35 or P45 chipset preferably.
 
Thanks for the info. I just want something to tide me over until the fall...so the crappy BIOS im ok with ... for now. Just looking for something to game on (bfbc2/css) that will be stable until october - is this an EVGA issue or an nvidia chipset issue?

btw on this rma'd board, q6600, no oc, single vid card.

Essentially the EVGA, ECS, BFG 680i SLI boards are all based on the NVIDIA reference design and are all made by Foxconn. The BIOS is NVIDIA's design etc. I believe there are quality control issues with the silicon for the chipset itself based on things I've seen like the chipsets actually splitting layer by layer. Also the BIOS has many issues such as running extremely aggressive voltage settings for everything which leads to more stability initially but poor longevity of components. Not to mention increased heat load. The BIOS also has had revisions over their first year of being on the market which resolved some issues and created others. They lack sufficient option ROM space for some video card setups which was laughable, and they had tons of RAID controller compatibility issues. These changes were made to increase overclockability and supposedly system stability but that last item is debatable.

Then you get into the reference designs other failings. The main failing is their voltage hardware. I'm not sure if the VRM specifications where followed correctly or not but the boards voltage hardware wasn't up to the challenge of running the increased power draw of Intel's quad core processors when overclocked. Not at all. This led to terrible FSB clocks which were unacceptable for enthusiasts. That's what led to a slight hardware change in later revisions of the board. Even still the overclocks weren't anywhere near what they were on comparable Intel boards.

It isn't just the CPU VRM's that are bad but the whole power system. Out of systems I've seen, and various forum posts about these boards, it seems anyone running multiple video cards will experience more issues, or reduced longevity compared to anyone using single GPU setups. Add a quad core CPU into the mix, or a heavily overclocked dual core CPU and this process of degeneration seems to accelerate even faster. An overclocked quad core can kill a 680i SLI board even faster. I've had them die in just a few weeks. Hell I've had 680i SLI boards die using Q6600's at stock speeds. The poor voltage regulation doesn't stop there. Oh no! It extends to surges on the USB ports, (which leads to USB port failure) and occasionally peripheral damage. I lost a number of flash drives that way before I figured out that was happening. It gets even better. Those pieces of shit tend to overvolt your memory modules. Even set to automatic or factory spec, the voltages tend to run higher in reality burning up your memory modules. They had SATA data corruption, crackling audio problems with integrated audio and some add-in boards, and to top all that shit off they had driver issues too. Among them were an issue when using NVIDIA video cards in SLI and the nForce driver software when watching full screen video. It would cause random hard locks of your machine. How awesome is that?

These are some of the worst motherboards ever made. NVIDIA cut so many corners on their design to make them as affordable as possible but still charged premium prices. I've been working in the computer industry for 16 years and I've only seen two other motherboards that were even close to being as shitty. One was a Soyo which I can't remember the model number of and the other was the infamous FIC VA503+ AT Super7 board. That was a huge piece of shit as well.
 
Essentially the EVGA, ECS, BFG 680i SLI boards are all based on the NVIDIA reference design and are all made by Foxconn. The BIOS is NVIDIA's design etc. I believe there are quality control issues with the silicon for the chipset itself based on things I've seen like the chipsets actually splitting layer by layer. Also the BIOS has many issues such as running extremely aggressive voltage settings for everything which leads to more stability initially but poor longevity of components. Not to mention increased heat load. The BIOS also has had revisions over their first year of being on the market which resolved some issues and created others. They lack sufficient option ROM space for some video card setups which was laughable, and they had tons of RAID controller compatibility issues. These changes were made to increase overclockability and supposedly system stability but that last item is debatable.

Then you get into the reference designs other failings. The main failing is their voltage hardware. I'm not sure if the VRM specifications where followed correctly or not but the boards voltage hardware wasn't up to the challenge of running the increased power draw of Intel's quad core processors when overclocked. Not at all. This led to terrible FSB clocks which were unacceptable for enthusiasts. That's what led to a slight hardware change in later revisions of the board. Even still the overclocks weren't anywhere near what they were on comparable Intel boards.

It isn't just the CPU VRM's that are bad but the whole power system. Out of systems I've seen, and various forum posts about these boards, it seems anyone running multiple video cards will experience more issues, or reduced longevity compared to anyone using single GPU setups. Add a quad core CPU into the mix, or a heavily overclocked dual core CPU and this process of degeneration seems to accelerate even faster. An overclocked quad core can kill a 680i SLI board even faster. I've had them die in just a few weeks. Hell I've had 680i SLI boards die using Q6600's at stock speeds. The poor voltage regulation doesn't stop there. Oh no! It extends to surges on the USB ports, (which leads to USB port failure) and occasionally peripheral damage. I lost a number of flash drives that way before I figured out that was happening. It gets even better. Those pieces of shit tend to overvolt your memory modules. Even set to automatic or factory spec, the voltages tend to run higher in reality burning up your memory modules. They had SATA data corruption, crackling audio problems with integrated audio and some add-in boards, and to top all that shit off they had driver issues too. Among them were an issue when using NVIDIA video cards in SLI and the nForce driver software when watching full screen video. It would cause random hard locks of your machine. How awesome is that?

These are some of the worst motherboards ever made. NVIDIA cut so many corners on their design to make them as affordable as possible but still charged premium prices. I've been working in the computer industry for 16 years and I've only seen two other motherboards that were even close to being as shitty. One was a Soyo which I can't remember the model number of and the other was the infamous FIC VA503+ AT Super7 board. That was a huge piece of shit as well.

Did this problem extend to the 980's for AMD cpu's? I've just had my M4N82 die and am wondering what to replace it with, The only stipulation is triple x16 length slots.
 
Did this problem extend to the 980's for AMD cpu's? I've just had my M4N82 die and am wondering what to replace it with, The only stipulation is triple x16 length slots.

No, the problems with the 680i SLI chipsets are reference boards were limited to 600 and 700 series chipsets and the NVIDIA reference designs which used them.
 
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