eVGA NVidia 680i SLI Motherboard Review

[Capper]

For your reading enjoyment....Tom's (Quakindude) first review as a member of the HL Staff

The world of Core 2 Duo ownership is changing rapidly. We haven’t seen this type of technology race since the U.S. and Russia went at it after WW2! The casualties are numerous and the battlefields aren’t always pre-defined in this dynamic we find ourselves in. Low and Behold! NVIDIA's latest attempt at satisfying the Intel crowd, the eVGA 680i SLI has arrived! Will this be another littered field of embattled and ultimately, destroyed silicon, solder and PCB? Or will NVIDIA and eVGA finally place a flagged battlement on those bloody fields for the Intel/SLI crowd to rally ‘round?

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[Jokerswild]

Very good review. Good catch on that thermal grease but hey at least there was some. I watched a brand new ford roll off the assembly line when my dad worked there and they put it on the test rollers and fired it up only to find that no one put oil in it.

[Quakindude]

nVidia released P22 then almost immediately released P23. P23 is supposed to fix the SATA issues, and posts in eVGA's forums would indicate it does for some. However, there are still some folks out there having SATA Raid issues.

A lot of those folks having RAID issues are, IMHO, too new to self building, or too impatient to be thorough, and are having issues due to self-inflicted wounds. When I tried a SATA Raid array, I used 2x250Gb HDD's, I had troubles getting it to initialize under the shipping Bios, but with P21, I had no problems at all. Where a lot of these guys are screwing up is that they don't completely remove the Array and then rebuild it. A fresh initialization and format would solve a large majority of their problems as the previous issues seem to be with how the RAID chip formatted the array.

I personally will not use Raid again unless I have critical data and run Raid 1. For my tastes, I'll keep my two separate SATA drives running as primary and additional storage.

nVidia released P22 and P23 after all the testing had been completed and the article was in to Rich for editing.

My biggest warning about this board would be the SATA Raid issues. The sound and Video issues seem to be fixed now, but I'm not 100% comfortable recommending this board to someone who has RAID high on their list of Must Have's. I do have confidence the problems will eventually be ironed out, there's a total of 5 Bios releases since the board was put to market, if it is a problem that can be fixed by software. Seeing as how some folks are getting a lot of good results using the new Bios, P23, I'm led to believe it is a software issue and not a hardware issue.

Now, if you can live without Raid for awhile, and want SLI capabilities plus overclocking, this is the board to have! I'd love to have some higher rated ram to try out too. I'll be upgrading to P23 later this week and see if it has anything in store for overclocking, but I've been very happy with running my E6600 at 3.375Ghz without over-volting it. When I over-volted the CPU to 1.4v, I was able to hit 3.6Ghz stable. But seeing as how this is my $300 in this CPU, I only left it that speed long enough to run Super Pi to 1m, which took the score from 15s even to 14.97s.

[Jokerswild]

Thanks for the update Tom. This would be a board I'd consider if I was buying a new system today since I'm not real enthusiastic about raid anyway.

[wtcnbrwndo4u]

I dig this mobo! I want it...





Damnit, I need money first...

[Panda Man]

EXCELLENT review Quakindude, enjoyed it! I would grab this board over the DFI 975x if I had the money, but the $250 price tag is hard for me to justify at this point in time.

[Quakindude]

Thanks guys. I was pretty stoked to write it. Thanks go out to all the guys that contributed by doing graphs and editing for me! It sure as heck wasn't all done by me.

[MontereyJack]

The NVIDIA 650i chipset is a lot cheaper than the 680i and has almost the same performance. Check out the 650i review at AnandTech: ASUS P5N-E SLI: NVIDIA's 650i enters with a Bang