Hi all,

Been looking at getting one of the 680i mobo, but tbh am bit confused. I have read the review of them on this site and it seems the asus Striker extreme comes out on top.

Problem is i have seen alot of peeps reviews saying it has alot of flaws, bios problems, flawed fsb when overclocking etc.

The evga seems to have some nice comments and so does the abit. i also found a different asus mobo which seems to do the same as striker, but does it have the same problems as the extreme. Any help advice would be helpful as tbh im going NutZ

Boards

1 Asus Striker Extreme Quad Core motherboard SKT 775 nForce 680i SLI Intel® Core™2 Extreme / Core™2 Duo ATX Motherboard

2Asus P5N32-E SLi nForce 680 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard

3BFG nForce 680 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard

4 EVGA nForce 680i SLI Motherboard LGA775 Intel® Core™2 Extreme / Core™2 Duo ATX

5 Abit IN9-32x MAX PCIE WIFI Motherboard LGA775 nForce 680i SLi Intel Core 2 Duo / Quad processors Dual PCI-E ATX

Two of your boards listed are both in fact the nVidia reference board (BFG, eVGA)... all reference boards are put out by board partrners in much the same way as they do their discreet graphics cards- a single contract manufacturer, all boards are identical, with a little light branding and differences in bundled parts.

There are in fact five reference board partners, besides the fact that they can be purchased directly from nVidia- eVGA, XFX, ECS, BFG, and Foxconn. As Foxconn is the only manufacturer on that list, it's a fairly good guess that they are building all of them. Biostar was rumored to be a reference board partner also, but nothing is on their website as of yet.

ALL REFERENCE BOARDS ARE IDENTICAL. They are made in the same factory, with identical components. Whomever is cheapest on that list the day you purchase is the one to go with, if you want a reference board. The reference boards all have the most mature drivers, and a reputation for being somewhat undercooled (esp. the northbridge) if in fact overclocking is what you want to do. A properly clocked reference board cools just fine.

There are also five 680i board partners that chose to do in-house designs around the 680i core logic- really four, from the enthusiast point of view, since the DFI lanparty offering is the 680i LT SLI.... not the one we want, we want the 680i SLI.

These boards are available from Abit, Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI.

Abit is perhaps the best priced non-reference board, Gigabyte is the most feature rich (quad GB lan, four eSata ports). MSI's version has onboard X-Fi, a motherboard first, with a controller chip provided by Creative Labs. Also worth noting is an ability to run four 16x PCIe lanes, in a 16x 8x 8x 8x mode... Abit has the 'guru panel', kinda neat... read about it on their website. You know about the striker and it's clone, so that about covers the non-reference boards.

Out of the non-reference boards, Im liking Asus the least. From a manufacturing quality standpoint, Asus boards seem afflicted with 'she was pretty last year' syndrome... I say this having fixed a pile of Asus based computers at work. Im going with the Gigabyte version, myself, once the price comes down. Asus support is ATROCIOUS, even if you are an OEM.

Hope this clears up any questions you may have.

Happy Building

thank for reply. have decided which board i want now, and price is how i picked it, as like you say they nearly all the same one way or another.

That's very good info, thanks!

So I'm better off spending C$403 on a Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6 LGA775 NF680i instead of C$375 on a Striker? I'm thinking of a Q6700 CPU (to be released on July 22) and an 8800 GTX, and I'd like the ability to add a second 8800 GTX later. Would that work with this Gigabyte motherboard?

Thanks!

disidious:

I would go that route, myself. Yes. the Gigabyte board would make a truly awesome SLI rig. Please note vista drivers arent available for SLI as of yet.

Thanks!

Yeah, I've been reading some reviews on the Gigabyte in the past hour or so and it looks brilliant.

I knew about Vista and SLI, but thanks for the warning anyway. I'll give Vista a try when SP1 is out and nVidia finishes the drivers. Hopefully that will happen before 2010