Working 600-700 NVidia MB, How?

B

Bunkey

Weaksauce
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Mar 1, 2008
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I'll be blunt, I am "GREEN WITH ENVY" about anyone that has a working 600 or 700 series NVidia SLi working motherboard. I spent some $500.00, total, for an Abit 680i and three months later, an XFX 780i, along with some $300.00 for three sets of RAM and $600.00 for two GeForce 8800GTS 640 video cards. They delivered a dismal, hellish, trouble prone, unusable computer user experience. For the hours spent working on the problems of these boards, if paid minimum wage, I would have earned a $1,000.00 easily. I agree I made some serious, learning, mistakes on the 680i board, but there are so many problems reported and more fixes suggested, from using certain brands of RAM to not populating all 4 DIMMs to changing the BIOS CMOS chip and on and on. There seems to be no real certain, certified or documented fixes to make these boards work. And many users have returned these boards, more than once with little or no change or satisfaction.
So, I ask, do you have a really stable, usable NVidia MB system, out of the box, you are using on a regular bases without any unusual problems? Did you fix any problems to achieve a working computer or get a replacement, that delivered one? Please tell your story and share your experience and success.
 
I have a 680i SLI SE(TR) and it worked fine out of the box and i have not really had that much problems with it.
 
I had an EVGA 680i over the past year that started out fine, and then started killing RAM modules. Finally last week, it slowly killed off each of its dimm slots so that I could only run with 1 stick of ram. That's when I decided I'd had enough and bought my new Asus mobo. I couldn't be happier. Not only does my new board oc very well, it also feels a lot more stable than the 680i did.
 
Got a MSI P7N 780i board. Did a beta BIOS update out of the box, been very stable with my computer. I'm also running SLi. No problems and my system has been pretty stable...*knock-on-wood*
 
I haven't heard any problems with evga's 750i ftw. Mine runs great with a q9300 overclocked.
 
I built my current game rig with the Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus back in April 07, and it's been problem free since then, including through a fresh install of Vista Ultimate x64 in January 08. I typically don't keep a board that long unless I can't find any compelling reasons to replace it. The last board I kept this long was the Asus A7V8X.

Around June/July of 07, I built two systems for friends using the Asus P5N-E SLI and they are still in operation today. I didn't have any problems building those either. Both were exactly the same: E6600 (@3.0GHz), 2GB Corsair DDR2, Geforce 8800GTS, Corsair 520HX, WinXP Pro. Both have upgraded to Vista x64 recently and didn't have any issues.

I didn't have any problems with any of the builds. All three had the respective BIOS versions that were being recommended by others at the time, so no problems there. The one mod I did make to both P5N-E's was to add a Zalman heatsink kit to the southbridge since it didn't have one and it was a quick and cheap task.

Sorry to hear about your problems. I expected to have them based on other experiences, but never did and still don't.
 
Is it safe to say the 750i ftw is one of the best boards at the moment.? Haven't heard much of the 780i ftw. Nice to see ppl come forward with some positives about he x80 series board tho...there is a lot of rant lately. I've had great luck w/ my used 780i so far. Picked up a new one for another system I like it so much. Like most forums when you search something out, you generally find the troubled ppl first. I haven't heard much good about any of the latest chipsets, including intel. Just hope I don't get a bad one :)
 
Well if you count all the 680i SLI boards I've owned and add my friends boards into the mix I've personally worked with about 17 or so of these things. Unfortunately all but three of them are dead now. I've had six DOA boards, one die to a watercooling leak (obviously not the boards' fault) and all but one of the remaining 12 I've owned personally died within three months. Out of my friends boards only one EVGA 680i SLI is left. There are also two P5N32-E SLI boards still alive and kicking. So out of three ASUS boards (my Striker Extreme and two P5N32-E SLI's) two are running. So out of all the 680i SLI boards out there the ASUS ones seem to live the longest. Though my sampling of ASUS boards is far smaller than my sampling of 680i SLI reference boards.
 
Ive had mine almost a year now and Ive never had any trouble with it at all. Runnin the quad at 2.7 undervolted with no probs.
 
Asus P5N32 E SLI Plus and no problem at all (single vid)-Original owner almost gave it away because he couldn't get it to boot.
 
Dan_D said:
Well if you count all the 680i SLI boards I've owned and add my friends boards into the mix I've personally worked with about 17 or so of these things. Unfortunately all but three of them are dead now. I've had six DOA boards, one die to a watercooling leak (obviously not the boards' fault) and all but one of the remaining 12 I've owned personally died within three months. Out of my friends boards only one EVGA 680i SLI is left. There are also two P5N32-E SLI boards still alive and kicking. So out of three ASUS boards (my Striker Extreme and two P5N32-E SLI's) two are running. So out of all the 680i SLI boards out there the ASUS ones seem to live the longest. Though my sampling of ASUS boards is far smaller than my sampling of 680i SLI reference boards.
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CRYKIE
 
quisman said:
Is it safe to say the 750i ftw is one of the best boards at the moment.? Haven't heard much of the 780i ftw. Nice to see ppl come forward with some positives about he x80 series board tho...there is a lot of rant lately. I've had great luck w/ my used 780i so far. Picked up a new one for another system I like it so much. Like most forums when you search something out, you generally find the troubled ppl first. I haven't heard much good about any of the latest chipsets, including intel. Just hope I don't get a bad one :)
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The EVGA 750 SLI FTW is the best NVIDIA chipset based board for the Intel platform that I've worked with.
 
I thank you for the replys. I wish someone had come up with what they did to fix a problem prone NVidia 600-700 motherboard. This is what I was looking for, but I know the problems are variable and inconsistent and maybe, you just don't know what was done to get it to work, if that has ever happened with anyone. Reviews, especially for the 680i, many times reflected inconsistent benchmarks or test results, even with two of the same boards not matching. And many people have just never got the boards to work. I don't know what were the strikes against me getting the boards to work? Was it using 4X1 Gigs. of RAM and enabling SLi Memory, which in the XFX 780i was not allowed from BIOS P05, only 2X1 Gigs. is official with NVidia, now. Or having the QX6850 Dual 2 Quad core and, or, it running 1333 FSB, which several BIOS updates say they are correcting problems or improving. My personal thoughts are, that NVidia marketed an immature, unrefined or defect(s) ridden motherboard or did poor execution, manufacture, with no quality control or some combination or all of these apply. But for some people it has worked and worked well, as reported. So, it appears it just is all a roll of the dice and for me, it was a very expensive Snake Eyes twice.
 
This is what I was looking for, but I know the problems are variable and inconsistent and maybe, you just don't know what was done to get it to work, if that has ever happened with anyone.
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Keep buying/RMA'ing them until you get one that works. Then cross your fingers and pray it doesn't up and die on you.

The evga 750i FTW has been the least problematic of them for me.
 
MaStaFLaSH said:
I am having trouble getting my Q6600 + 680i stable at 3.6, 680i sucks for quads period.
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I haven't had that with my 680i ... I just had the problem that it wouldn't run my Quad (yes, I have the A1 revision) at STOCK speed...but it's perfectly happy at 3.6Ghz.

To be honest though...it's one of the stupidist boards I've ever owned. Next chipset I get will be Intel based. It's picky, it runs hot, has a huge failure rate, etc. I went with Nvidia because at the time, I thought I might go SLI and I'd also had excellent luck with Nvidia chipsets with my AMD cpu's.
 
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