NVIDIA releases new 680i BIOS - fixes problems?

Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 19th December 2006
Comments (4) Stumble
NVIDIA releases new 680i BIOS - fixes problems?

The P23 BETA BIOS claims to fix all of the data corruption issues that many have had on NVIDIA's nForce 680i SLI mobo

A couple of days ago, NVIDIA released a BETA BIOS (which you can download here) for its nForce 680i SLI motherboards that are currently being sold by EVGA and BFGTech. Normally we don't write about BIOS updates, but this one is quite substantial.

If you're a regular reader of our Hardware & Overclocking Forum, you may have come across a few threads about EVGA's nForce 680i SLI motherboard, where we've outlined our rather poor experiences with three different EVGA boards from three different batches.

The third board was specifically selected and pre-tested by NVIDIA, but still didn't fix the problems that we have had with the board(s).

Many end users had experienced SATA issues and data corruption. Now, we are not quite sure whether that's what we've experienced, but we are treating our situation (although with slightly different issues than what most are reporting) as a SATA-related issue.

We are now in the process of wiping any of the hard drives that have been used on one of the EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboards we've attempted to test and starting from completely fresh (even our drive containing the main backup of our benchmarking suite is being wiped clean). We're doing this so that there is no question that any of the data on our drives is corrupt. Thankfully, we have a backup of our benchmarking suite on our office network, and also on DVD.

After over three weeks of exhaustive testing, NVIDIA was no closer to solving our own problems, since many of the issues we were having were different to what other reviewers and end users had experienced and passed back to NVIDIA and EVGA. However, we had started to come to the conclusion that many of the hard locks and crashes we were experiencing were actually related to the board being set up too aggressively. In particular, we felt the chipset timings (that aren't exposed in the BIOS) were the source of the problems because we've had similar issues in the past that turned out to be related to the board being set up too aggressively.

Interestingly, today, HardOCP has had the chance to sit down with Drew Henry, General Manager of MCP Business at NVIDIA, in order to discuss the issues that many people have had, along with detailing how the BIOS engineers worked to identify and fix the issues that were apparent.

It turns out that our diagnosis was on the right lines, as Drew referred to the issue as a problem with the signal timings on the board. Since nForce 680i SLI uses the same MCP as the AMD version of nForce 590 SLI - and to the best of our knowledge, there are no data corruption issues with that MCP - the issue is actually related to the way that the memory controller handled data (i.e. very badly).
Quote Gunsmith 19th December 2006, 18:43
i must be one of the lucky ones, ive not had a single problem since installing it, could it be that im running my drives at 3GBs? :?
Quote Tim S 19th December 2006, 19:11
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gunsmith
i must be one of the lucky ones, ive not had a single problem since installing it, could it be that im running my drives at 3GBs? :?
It doesn't affect every board, which is why it's a tricky problem to track down (and fix) - I'm glad you've been luckier than we have, I'd be about ready to throw the board back at NVIDIA/EVGA if I was a paying customer and had gone through three boards. :)
Quote samkiller42 19th December 2006, 21:52
Hum, i also think im lucky with my board, just unlucky with the ram im using, would you recomend me upgrading the bios with this tim?

Thanks for using a small slice of my thread as well :D

Thanks

Sam

Edit: Tim, this is the ram im using (2*1gb)http://www.corsairmemory.com/corsair/products/specs/CM2X1024-6400.pdf, can you tell me if it is good or not, im also thinking of replacing the EVGA with a striker, would this ram be ok in the striker, cheers Tim
Quote phat-ant 20th December 2006, 10:47
no problems on my board so far touch wood.
but will probably update the bios just for fun :)
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