EVGA 680i Motherboard Woes
I’m posting this from my new PC. So far I’ve tried out Supreme Commander and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic and both run beautifully. I’m excited to reinstall Oblivion and see how it looks with the new setup.
Alas, everything is not as wonderful as I would like and I’m probably going to have to take the whole thing apart again. It looks like my motherboard is baffed as it won’t POST with any RAM in either of the first two slots. I replaced the original RAM I bought with some better, faster RAM from Mushkin, tweaked the timing and voltages, and flashed the BIOS, all to no avail. The people in this forum posting didn’t seem to have much better luck and just ended up sending the board back for a replacement. After a couple support emails to EVGA (who, I will say, responded quickly to my questions), they told me to send it back as well.
A part of me just wants to ignore the problem, since the only real consequence of the two RAM slots not working is that I can’t take advantage of dual-channel goodness and, practically speaking, I’m probably not going to notice any performance differences. On the other hand, having jush shelled out $250 for a brand new piece of equipment, I shouldn’t have to settle for anything only half-working. I just need to figure out whether I send it back to TigerDirect or EVGA themselves.
As a heads up to anyone thinking about getting a EVGA 680i motherboard, while it does come highly recommended from a lot of places, if you have a look around the EVGA forums it appears a lot of people are having difficulties with it, particularly with RAM. It’s hard to tell if the problems are especially widespread, or if the people having problems are just especially loudspoken, but there are problems nonetheless. EVGA seems to be pretty good at sending replacements, but ideally you don’t want to have to send your hardware back in the first place.
I also didn’t realize this at the time I put in my order, but there are two different versions of the 680i motherboard, the “A1″ and the “T1″. They’re both supposed to be identical boards but the first comes with a lifetime warranty and a couple extra parts while the second comes with only a one year warranty. I, of course, have the second one. I’m going to try and see if I can exchange my defective T1 for a new A1.