EVGA 680i issue/s

[Mullet]

All,

Just built my C2D rig and all was going well...BUT...

The exhaust fan header is borked...so no power to the fan...and more worryingly...

It simply refuses to recognise my 2 cards installed in Sli (7800GTXs)...they both apperar in device manager but one is not able to start...

I know my cards are oK cos I have tried both in the upper most slot in single mode...

Any thoughts guys before I RMA?

[Clunk]

If the fan header is broke, send it back, that is terrible for a 200 quid board....get a P5B

[raffraffraff]

For such an expensive motherboard, I'm not impressed. I also have serious problems with my onboard RAID. Plenty of people have said "don't trust RAID - always do a backup", but for the home user it's not financially feasible to purchase a proper backup system. I have a growing collection (600GB+) of movies, music, ISO images etc. The only thing that is affordable for me is RAID 5, but the 680i gave me bad performance and no reassurance that my data will survive a hard disk crash.

When a disk failed in my EVGA 680i RAID 5 array last night, I expected the controller to continue without skipping a beat. Instead it completely died. Windows just 'lost sight' of the array. After a reboot, the array shows itself to be degraded as expected, but when I tried to get into the array config using F10, my keyboard didn't work. I rebooted several times, but the keyboard didn't appear again until I pull the power plug and waited until the blue LED on the motherboard went out. I can reproduce this problem 100% of the time by rebuilding my array with the failed disk and waiting for the inevitable failure. I've reproduced this with USB and PS/2 keyboards. Buggy firmware? I'd say. And I'm using the latest BIOS and latest drivers. Even tried it without the nVidia IDE SW driver (as some people think it's a problem in itself)

The solution: I've just ordered a €300 PCI-e RAID controller from Scan. It's a 'proper' RAID controller with phenomenal speed. I'm turning off ALL SATA & IDE on this board, apart from a single IDE channel for the DVDRW. I'd send this motherboard back, but I've already waited two weeks for delivery and spent an age building this PC. I don't want to wait two weeks for a replacement and have to go through the entire build process again. And besides, I don't think a new board will fix it. I've been reading a lot of forums where people have the same problems with the 680i chipset.

If I had my way, manufacturers would produce at least one high quality motherboard with nothing but PCI-e slots, USB and good overclocking features. I'll buy my own sound, graphics and RAID thanks very much. If such a thing existed, I'd gladly spend €300 on it. Anybody else agree?