EVGA 680i Bad Motherboard?

Some 680i are fine with running a first gen quad core CPU. Others, alas, seem to have problems. I had similar problems. I finally bit the bullet and replaced it with a P35 Gigabyte board.

Mine ran happily with an E6600 at 3.6 GHz. (stress tested 24 hours with Orthos). Put a Q6600 in it. It wasn't stable even at stock speeds.

Bought a Gigabyte P35 board for the Q6600. Stress tested stock settings with Prime95 for 24 hours. Ran fine. Worked up to a 3.6 GHz OC. After final settings, I stress tested 72 hours.

Came to the conclusion that my 680i board just doesn't like quad core chips.

If all this sounds kind of familiar, you may have a similar problem.

(If it helps, the error given when it fails to POST is 50, though I am not sure if this is the % complete of the POST or the actual error code.)

I have a 680i with a Q6600 processor. I was experiencing the same lock ups and graphical glitches in games. I am using SLI enabled RAM which has an "auto-overclock" feature. I discovered that disabling this feature in the bios solved my problems although the bus speed on my ram is now set at 800mhz . Anyways, I now run all games at near max settings and have not had one single forced reboot since I changed the setting. Before I changed it, I had to reboot at least every half hour.

Also, I discovered this work-around reading many forum posts like this one. These 680i motherboards are flawed and if I were you I would try clocking down your RAM even if you aren't using the sli-optimized modules. Can't hurt to try right?