i am going to buy one of these for my new system but for some reason the asus 680i is like 200 dollars more then the evga 680i........

why is that and what is the difference between both of them?

When the Striker hits the retail channel it might be $80 more than the eVGA.
The eVGA is practically the reference board, wich was made and designed by Foxconn and sold to eVGA by the way. But the Stiker will be much better enginereed and BIOS tweaked.
The ROG marketing crap and the heatpipe jungle just skyrockets the price tough.

Honestly, after reading the review of the evga board... I can't imagine much more tweaking going on in the BIOS. The "PC Performance" reviewer stated that it was the best Enthusiast BIOS he has ever seen... and that nvidia has answered back to all the wishes of OC'ers.

Screw the Stiker..

Striker should be 350+! that'll do everything you need =)

And PCAnalyst, look in the striker thread, Coolaler has picture of the BIos of the stiker, impressive!

Obiously he hasnt seen the Striker and RD600 yet...

Man... I looked all over for the striker thread containing those BIOS pics... there were about 20 results from search and multiple posts... too much to look through at work.

But should I assume you have seen the EVGA BIOS, and are still less impressed by it?

Linky

And yes I am impressed and to tell the truth the eVga bios can probably do anything I need. Just have more faith ind DFI/ABit/Asus to provide frequent updates on their bios and improve performance thru a the first month of the board...

Also the striker bios seem to have more option, and basically push everything further...

Thanks for the link... from a quick glance I could see little difference, but I have no problem taking your word on it.

As for dependability issue I have to, as I have no personal reference, but the question i have is - if I am getting a pair of eVGA 8800 cards, then would it be a better idea to go with eVGA mobo for the sake of those pesky little compatibilty issues that tend to pop up... or am I just overanalising?

The first batch of 8800 are all exactly the same except for the bundle and the sticker on the heatsink. I don't remember who did this batch but there is 0 difference...

If you look at the eVGa motherboard and like the layout, then I would probably go for it. The BIOS does have pretty much anything you might want, the ROG push thing further...on a 6600 with air/water it probably is irrelevant. I do trust asus more then eVga to extract every ounce of performance from their board though

y will the 6600 overclock good on this board with a aftermarket fan/heatsink on the cpu ... air cooled at first but once i get enough bills ill prolly go for water cooled....

i just recently bought the eVGA, its filled with features and i couldnt want much more, it is also from what i have seen so far very stable, no crashes or any weird things like that i dont Regret my buy and the Asus may be more troublesome then you think. some of their boards are extremely buggy

Since when does eVGA make motherboards... well, lemme rephrase that, since when does eVGA make quality motherboards... I'd still wait for an offering from the big 5 mobo makers and see how they compare (Asus/Gigabyte, Foxconn, DFI, ECS, and Universal Abit)

The 6600/6700/6800 OC good enough on the 680i mobo, probably far enoguh to max out any Air Cooler, yet they don't seem to hit their full potential compared to the 6300/6400, probably a bios Issue.

But yeah you should be fine with that board for 3.6ghz+

do you recommend i get a 6400 or 6300 c2d instead of a 6600... like you said the 6400 and 6300 can reach their full potential rather then the 6600..........????

what do you think i should get ....... 6600 or 6400 or 6300?...... price isnt a issue and that 4mb l2 cache is sounding pretty hefty to mee!!

do you think the reason is because the 6600 has higher fsb multipliers then the 6400 and the 6300 hundred?

meaning it needs a top of the line board to overclock to its full potential

and i prolly wait till x mas to build my pc anyway cause of the proce drops and deals... and plus hopefully there will be more reviews on the striker and the evga so i will no what to get

I personally will go for the 6600 and 680i/RD600 just before X-mas.
The 4 meg of cache will give you 2-10% boost with ~5% in most applications.

With a 6600 you can probably reach ~3.6ghz with a good after market cooler. With the 6300/6400 you might reach even higher speed with more bandwith. If price is not an issue, I suggest the 6600 Oced to 3.6 that will be blazing fast no doubt about that!

Apparently the reason the 4meg part hit a wall is unknown, the higher multiplier is not the issue, apparently, to early to tell I think.

Btw the 680i chipset are pretty much top of the line and cooling should be the limit of your OCing possibilities giving the proper RAM...

Could always unlink the RAM so it doesn't run at a 1:1 ratio, but that itself might start generating problems... either way, ram is damn expensive, and only $300+ Ram can begin to touch the FSB's the e6300 and e6400 can acheive (525mhz fsb *2... DDR2 1050 ram....) but most of the high quality ram should be able to hit near that target (DDR2-800 ram I mean)

I would choose the ASUS mobo; maybe not the Striker, but maybe the P5N32-E SLI board. I've always had good experiences with ASUS and I agree that they tend to make modifications to their boards to get more performance and stability.

Kind of like two or three years ago (I forget exactly) when Intel released the 865 and 875 chipsets, but said you had to purchase the 875 to get the PAT (Performance Accelerated Technology, or whatever it was called), but then ASUS found a way to enable the same technology on their mobos for the 865 chipset.

Isn't the eVGA board actually a Foxconn board?

Designed by nVidia, produced by Foxconn, from what I gather, BUT foxconn is suppose to come up with their own design...

Hmmmm... maybe I should rephrase that... if Foxconn did make the eVGA board, it would most likely be geared towards nVidia's reference or with some tweaks that eVGA wanted, but like I said, eVGA isin't really a power player in the mobo industry so I'm farily certain that if Foxconn had it's way (or any other mobo maker) then they could produce a much better board (tweaks here and there, bios optimizations, etc...)

I need to know y i should get the 6600 instead of the 6300 and 6400?

if the 6300 and 6400 can overclock higher then why would i want to get the 6600.....4mb lz cache is nice but if it cant overclock as high as the other two then wats the big deal about the 6600?

also i need to know if anyone has actually gotten the evga/striker 680i to actualy no wat i want to go with........i want to know what one i should get or if i should wait till xmas and see what the rd600 is all about and to see if there is any good reviews on the 680i