Underbelly of the eVGA 680i

[Lestat]

Guys i saw something VERY disturbing on the backside of my new RMA 680i
distrubing enough to me that i am returning it to eVGA and they can keep it.

turn your motherboard over and look at the soldering points on your board.

ther eis a coil pack, i believe its over by the ram. the soldering point on this board i have sticks out further than anything else on the board.
mine stick out over 1/4 of an inch from the back of the board.
i looked at some other spots and ther eare several others that have excessively long wire/solder sticking out from the back of the board.

i am glad i have not tested this board since there is a strong chance that the coil pack wire that sticks out the back of the board could be long enough to make a direct arc onto the back of my case.

that scares the hell out of me as it could potentially fry everything attached to the board.

i have not pulled out my existing board yet but fear its the same way.

this could potentiall explain some certain anomolies we are seeing although any type of grounding issue would result in a helluva lot more than jsut issue(s). it would fry stuff or not make the system boot.


check out the wires sticking on the backside of your boards guys. see what you see.

i will take a picture of it on lunch and post it.

also note that the Sythe infinity nor the XP-90 work on this board properly.
the infinity just flat out hits the NB, end of story.
The XP-90 uses a rear mounting plate that cant be used as there are tiny capacitors that are in the way. the mounting plate wont actually sit straight to line up the holes.
also
when you mount it without the rear plate, on one of the holes on the underside of the board. there are traces less than a mm away from the hole.
if, i were to mount the XP-90 there is a great chance that the screw would actually crush the trace(s) thrus once again crippling the board.
keep that in mind guys as you blindly throw on your heatsinks.

also as i type this i am realising that with my apogee water block all there is, is screws ,,, and those screws could potentially be nailing those traces pretty darn hard. which bothers me.
i gotta yank the board tonight anyways so i will check it out.

[Lestat]

here is the traces by the heatsink mounting hole.

notice how a screw head could easily crush the trace or damage it




here are some shots of the copper wire poking thru the board.









i couldnt get a good profile shot to show just how long they really are. but several of the PWM solder points stick out pretty far also.

[bazx]

yep same as mine but i would say 3mm

[Lestat]

yeah 1/4 of an inch was way to much more like an 1/8th

but still have you honeslty seen a mobo have its wires sticking out the back this far.

with the amount of juice flowing thru there it could easily arc to the backside of the case given a worst case scenerio.


one other thing i noticed and this was just me. i was checking voltage points around the baord the other night and when inserting the positive lead of my DMM i was picking up 0.04v and i wasnt even touching anything.
this was around the SB area and surrounding area.
i didnt test other areas though.
the minute i pulled away from that area the DMM went to Zero i push it back towards that area it went back to 0.04v.
i have never seen that before and in the loosest of terms it could mean that there is a strong enough electrical field in that area that the DMM is reading it.

bazx try that with your board if you have a DMM. just ground it and run the positivelead around different areas of the baord. see if the DMM picks up any electrical fields floating around.

this could easily happen without properly shielded and grounded components on the board, its bleeding off juice into the air andpossibly interfering with components of the board

[GrimReaper]

wow that can make contact with the case unless you have some plastic covering on them

[D_o_S]

Why don't you just cut it off then?

[thecake90]

WOW I'd be pissed off if this happens to me.
May god be with you

[Lestat]

Why don't you just cut it off then?

i agree i could just cut them off but that doesnt bring the issue to eVGA's attention that there are some potentially big issues that could possibly be resolved by those soldering points being shorter.
and
if in fact that board is producing enough EMF that the DMM is picking it up.. that that again can and will cause interferance with other items including, ram, sound, video, and cpu and not to mention the other little dohickies on the board itself.

[Dumo]

Electrical tape will help....No problem with Phase or TT Big Typhoon back plates...

[squilliam]

Electrical tape will help....No problem with Phase or TT Big Typhoon back plates...

I was going to say...lol