Are the 680 chips 'ok' now?

boulton · 2 Mar 2008 at 11:38

I read a lot about the problems with 680 chips and sata problems/data corruption/lockups and the boards have pretty much been panned for them, but now they've released another bios are they ok now?

Basically, I need a board with reasonable overclockability, and dual lan is a must. It's pretty much between the evga 680i board and the asus p5k premium (the one with wifi, which I don't really need but hey).

I've always used nforce boards because they used to be the only good chips for motherboards but not only that, I was planning on running RAID 01 for backup purposes and apparently the asus motherboard doesn't support that, although I could live without it if there were enough reasons to go for the p5k.

So, are the 680i boards worth getting now? Bearing in mind I'm planning on buying a q9450 in a month or so along with the board.

WJA96 · 2 Mar 2008 at 11:49

J&W IP35-Pro has 2 LAN ports and is (with the lastest v1.3b BIOS) an excellent clocker and extremely stable to boot. At £70 it's still decent value.

spicypixel · 2 Mar 2008 at 12:20

Worth mentioning the OcUK motherboard has no onboard RAID.

WJA96 · 2 Mar 2008 at 12:56

spicypixel said:
Worth mentioning the OcUK motherboard has no onboard RAID.

No, but for useful purposes, the NVRaid of the NVidia boards is well known as somewhat unstable, and incompatible with any other RAID controller, whereas a 3rd party hardware RAID card can be transferred from machine to machine as required. Anyone serious about RAID should be thinking very hard about a PCIe hardware card like this Adaptec one. It'll outlast several motherboard swaps.

boulton · 3 Mar 2008 at 15:52

Anyone got any opinions on those 680 chips? I'll probably go for the asus cos it's cheaper and I might need wifi in the future but it would be good to know I wouldn't be throwing money away by buying the 680 if I chose to

V|per · 3 Mar 2008 at 15:58

You may have problems with the q9460 to work correctly in the 680i, ans the 680i don't officially support the 45nm cpu's (although some people are actually using them)

There are still bugs within the 680i's using all 4 ram slots filled, the raid isn't really up to much, they seem pretty good at dieing, and their chipset run very hot.

One of the only reasons people bought the 680i was for SLi, and now there's the 780i for that...

As a new board, i most certainly wouldn't bother with a 680i, the p35 chipset is probably your best bet, or, if money permits, the x38 chipset.

(I am in no way a 680i hater, infact, i have a BFG 680i, which, i appear to have been very lucky with...)

WJA96 · 3 Mar 2008 at 16:39

You'd be mental buying a 680 or 650 chipset board now unless it was exceptionally cheap. Both chipsets have been superceded and even the new chipsets aren't top of their respective markets. The NVidia disk controller is still horrible for anything other than the most basic requirements.

wingnuttzz · 3 Mar 2008 at 17:42

my 680i has been flawless so far

using onboard raid controller etc, and the baord itself has never been a problem

main thing i like about my evga 680i has to be the bios though compared to other mobo's i have used (crossfire ASUS and gigabyte boards) the Evga one is really nice to navigate and its just a good overclocker as you can unlink the CPU and memory meaning maximum overclock on each.