NVIDIA nForce 680i Chipset Problems

Users in several forums, particularly, in EVGA and Nvidia tech support forums, report about “lock up” and “disk error” issues with Serial ATA hard disk drives and RAID capabilities of the Nvidia nForce 680i SLI core-logic that sells for $120 per two chips alone. Some end users even cannot install Windows XP operating system, whereas others could not use their systems flawlessly for long and some even report data corruption.

Nvidia Corp.’s specialists confirmed in an interview with [H]ard|OCP web-site that the company was “aware of the nForce 680i SLI issue”, had been able to recreate it in their test labs and was working to fix this. However, the company states that this was “not a hardware issue, but rather a driver issue”, which is strange, as Nvidia’s Serial ATA drivers cannot affect installation procedures of Windows XP. Still, the company may resolve the issues by releasing certain firmware.

X-bit labs - Issues with Nvidia’s nForce 680i Serial ATA Controller

Some of the nForce 680i motherboards have some serious storage issues that can render a system build useless. Not all nForce 680i boards exhibit this problem.

I hate to say this as my personal 680i experiences have been solid and left me with a good impression of the product, but I cannot suggest you buy a 680i board till this problem has been ironed out. If you have a 680i board now and are having data corruption problems, return it if you can and get your money back. If you have already purchased a board and it has issues, I suggest you RMA it and hope you get a motherboard that does not show the same issues.

HardOCP - NVIDIA nForce 680i Chipset Problems

For us at OCWORKBENCH, we have reviewed two pieces of 680i board. The first being the ECS PN2 SLI2+ which is the same board like the EVGA as they are from the same manufacturer NVIDIA. The only difference is the sticker on the PCB and packaging. The second board we reviewed is the ASUS Striker Extreme. We have been able to run SLI using 2 pcs of 8800GTX without any issues.

One thing that I noted is with the heatpipe design. The South bridge heatsink is attached to the South bridge using a double sided tape. The data corruption issues might heat related. The simplest way is to remove the tape using axe oil on the contact point and replace it with thermal paste.

Another possibility of data corruption issues might be due to the lack of Power supplied to the raid arrays. It is important to use a reliable and high enough powered PSU to ensure stability with the system.

OCWorkbench - nForce 680i SATA corruption issues?