 |
Printed On: | September 9, 2008, 1:21 am |
| Category: | Chipsets & Motherboards | |
| Type: | Guides | |
| Posted By: | Shamino | |
| Date Posted: | March 10, 2007, 9:17 am |
 |
Rev A1 Change
About two weeks ago, EVGA announced that their NVIDIA 680i SLI Motherboards have gone into the Revision A1 state, an updated revision with improved overclocking for the Quad Core Kentsfield Users. As a show of their good customer service, they have offered direct cross swap for all customers of the first version of EVGA 680i boards and to cover the shipping costs both directions.
It's all good and easy if you live in the US, but some staying in certain countries may even find this "win-win" arrangement difficult... Or even, those with NVIDIA Reference boards but not under the EVGA brand name might not even be offered this service. Or even, those with non-reference 680i motherboards, what to do? I was lucky enough to receive a A1 revision and checked out what is it that is actually changed:
These 2 boards look so similar, you can't really tell with your naked eye!
Above is the area we want to look at. You see a very slight change there, but the crucial difference lies in just one resistor change. To manually convert your board into a Rev A1, look at the diagram below.
The 3 steps are pretty much self explanatory. First you unsolder the resistor, then you solder a 500ohms variable resistor to spot marked with other leg connected to ground. Set the VR at 100ohms first, then increase resistance till spot marked reads 70ohms, without any CPU inserted into the socket. Basically, what EVGA does with the returned boards is probably just changing out a resistor, similar to what we're doing here. GTLRef 1 Voltage is all that's changed on the A1 boards.
**Take Note all modding voids warranty!!**
Apparenty however, this does wonders for the FSB headroom on Kentsfield Quad Core processors and we are already seeing users running in excess of 400MHz FSB without breaking a sweat.
|
Other Motherboards
Now what about the other non-reference 680i motherboards?? ASUS P5N32-E SLI or ASUS Striker Extreme easily "updated" below:
ASUS P5N32-E SLI or ASUS Striker Extreme
First you unsolder the resistor, then you solder a 500ohms variable resistor to spot marked with other leg connected to ground. Set the VR at 200ohms first, then increase resistance till spot marked reads 0.85v to 0.87v when PC runs at BIOS default settings.
Abit IN9 32X MAX
Foxconn N68S7AA-8EKRS2H
Or even non-680i chipset motherboards, such as the Gigabyte DS3:
Gigabyte DS3
|