Evga 680i SLI and E8400 stability issues...

[Blazestorm]

My friend was given an Alienware, it happened to have an Evga 680i SLI board with an Alienware bios, I forced a flash to the latest EVGA BIOS and it seemed to work fine, it boots with the E8400 occasionally, other times it doesn't boot at all or hangs in random places.

I searched around and couldn't find much about it, most people didn't have issues with stability at stock speeds, just with overclocking.

Any ideas of what I can try? I ran mem-test on the memory, we originally had 2GB in there but upgraded to 4GB (originally wanted 6GB total). We had all of these, processor, VGA, PSU, memory (both kits) with an P43 chipset motherboard and it ran fine, but he wanted to keep the 680i in there for whatever reason (didn't want to spend more money upgrading it than he had to). So we're trying to get this working.

I've dropped the speeds, bumped voltages, tried everything I can think of right now but it still has stability issues. Temperatures don't seem out of line either. I tried Prime95 and it would run for 15-20 minutes before going to a black screen, the system is still running but I can't get anything out of the display (I don't believe that'd be the GTX295, but I could try that in my system + Furmark and see how it holds up.)

So any ideas of what I can try I would appreciate... thanks...

 

[TheGamerZ]

Did you try going back to the Alienware BIOS?

 

[Blazestorm]

Alienware BIOS wouldn't run the Wolfdale, which is why I had to force the EVGA flash...

It's the same exact board, the only difference is the BIOS which displayed an Alienware logo instead of an EVGA one...

But Alienware hasn't bothered to keep their's updated so there was nothing I could do.

 

[Blazestorm]

Anyone else got any thoughts of things I can try?

Replacing it with a P45 board is last resort... but if we can find one cheap enough we'll try that.