Evga 680i Madness

Check nvidia.com - their website mentions that there is a hotfix for the evga 680i. There were various problems with SATA not working right at all. If your HDD was connected, I'd try a boot without the drive hooked up.

What kind of PSU are you using? Is its power connector and AUX both connected?

I had a similar problem, where my equipment just would not work, i did do some fingering, but no luck at all, so i had a peek at some videos which were really hard on, im slowly getting there.

you might want to try the evga forums they are pretty helpful I just put together a similar system and i did not encounter this problem.



My system was
CD2 6600
Evga 680i
Thermaltake Toughpower 750 PSU
2 GB Crucial pc 8000 ram
Seagate hd
Antec P180 case
tuniq tower 120

I used the newest P23 bios

tried with/without PWR3 connected and it didn't make a difference

PSU is Thermaltake Toughpower 750

I read the evga forums and it seems many people are having the problem. eVga is telling them to RMA the board. My cpu is hosed as well and I wonder if the MB . I need to hold on to the board from Frys until I get a working cpu then I will determine if that needs to go back as well. Another friend of mine might get all of his parts from Frys this week and if that is the case we will try his cpu in board I have. I am hoping NE will send everything back quickly.

I know there are issues with SATA and RAID as well. I also heard that if you get EVGA 122-CK-NF68-AX instead of EVGA 122-CK-NF68-AR you will have better luck. I am hoping the third time will be the charm here...if it gets to a fourth I might have to just get the Striker and forget it.

i just bought new pieces, and im putting it together on monday. i've got the evga 680i as well, so i guess im hoping that things work out. for the price you pay for it, it better work properly.

For curiousity, are you using the standalone unit to power the card or the main power supply?

Good luck to you on your problem. I hope it works out for you.

My setup is as follows:

EVGA 680i
E6300
CM2X1024-8500C5 (2GBs)
EVGA 8800GTS
X-Fi Platinum
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Quad
Plextor PX-755SA
Mitsumi FDD/Memory Card reader
3x WD2500YS HDDs in RAID 5

I managed a very stable OC on the CPU to 3.15GHz, and the RAM to 4-4-3-9-2T. It ran Orthos for hours, Memtest86 for hours, and SuperPI, all without any problems.

Then, for the past three days in a row, I would shut-off the PC, then later, turn it back on, only to have the whole system fucked! And I mean it beep for several seconds, and when it went into the BIOS, every single setting was set to disabled!

It took a long time to reset everything, and even then it didn't last very long. So this morning, I took out the graphics and sound cards, as well as the HSF/CPU. I cleaned off the stock thermal pad goo and polished both the HSF and CPU. I put on some generic thermal paste I had used previously on another machine, and reconnected everything. And I cleared the CMOS.

It booted up fine, and all I needed to was to reset a few settings, such as RAID enabled and the CPU/RAM OCs. It booted into XP just fine, but when I turned on NVidia Monitor, I saw my IDLE temps reach into the 80sC!!! Normally, with all of the OCs and stress-testing under Orthos, the max temp I saw was like 60C.

And I have the AR version of the MB.

So, either the HSF didn't set properly, the thermal grease is no good, or something else is wrong. I am going to reset the HSF and use some new thermal paste and see what happens. After that, I won't have a clue.

BTW, everything is at stock speeds and the idle temp is 50C.


EDIT: I went to Radio Shack to pick-up some new thermal paste, then came home to remove, clean, and then reattach the HSF. I discovered that one of the plastic pins didn't actually go in to the hole and it bent (and that was the snap I heard). The HSF was very loose when I inspected it. What a noob.

Ugh, I hate to say this, but when I bought the thermal grease, I just grabbed a package without looking. All the package said was Thermaltake on it, but when I looked at the tube, it was...no, I can't say it...

...Artic Silver 5.  

Now that I have had both the stock thermal pads and AS5 on this PC, I can say this: There is (so far) absolutely no differece in temperature at the CPU! 47C E6300 OC'd to 3.15.

A little update here:

If you get the following code on your board 1d...then it is your memory voltage. The original memory I purchased was 2.1v stock however the bios on the mobo was locked at 1.9v. So I picked up a cheap stick that ran at 1.8v so that I could get my 2.1v memory to work. It would be nice if Evga would document that somewhere. To make matters worse, one stick of my 2GB Corsair XMS EPP memory was bad...so I have to RMA that now.

Important Things to remember regarding the EVGA 680i SLI

1) Make sure you have some 1.9v or less voltage memory laying around
to get you the bios so you can change the voltage.

2) Make sure you use good thermal paste

3) IF you get a "- - " on the digital readout then check your cpu

4) Say a prayer if it works the first time  

What is the point of gettinga 680i and that low end of a processor if your not going to over clock? You would be better off buying a lower end motherboard costing less then half of that and using that as a "stock" rig. Because the motherboard and everything you bought are so over clocking you would be a fool not to over clock with it.

I don't remember seeing any unusual error codes on the LED display. What I ended-up doing was to RMA the MB. It took like forever before I got a new one, and then over an hour to reroute all of the cables (Antec 900 case).

I haven't had that odd cleared-BIOS behavior since, but something new has arisen:

Someone else has mentioned that the SATA ports are numbered correctly in the book and what the MB actually sees. What I mean is that the two ports by themselves are 1 and 2, with the other 4 listed as 3, 4, 5, 6. The manual has them listed from top-down (as installed in a standard, right-side up case), or bottom-up. In either event, the MB saw them in the opposite order.

That may not be a big deal in a non-RAID setup, but it is sure a pain in the arse when you are! You first have to enable RAID, then you have to enable RAID on the specific channels you're RAIDing.

My system uses a RAID5 setup, and a PX-755SA DVD RW (also SATA). On the previous 680i I had, I simply enabled the last three channels to enable the RAID setup. But this time, something is very wrong.

When I boot, the only RAID option I want to boot from is from the HDD array, but if I don't have the channels enabled correctly, then the DVD RW is also included.

Here is were it gets strange: remember when I said I only needed to enable the final three channels (out of six)? Well that didn't work. At all. So I thought, "well maybe they re-wired the board or something". So I enabled only the first three channels. Again, errors about degraded RAID performance!

What I ended-up having to do was to enable channels 3, 4, and 6, even though I have wired them sequentially on the motherboard!

Weird, eh?

This is my first experience with EVGA MBs, and it may be my last.