A post by a moderator in the EVGA support forums has delivered the unfortunate news that current owners of EVGA (at probably all other) 680i motherboards will not be able to run Intel's upcoming 45 nano quad core Penyrn CPUs.

For those of you who shake your head at this statement in confusion, current owners of NVIDIA chipset 680i motherboards had been promised support for upcoming Penryn CPUs in future BIOS updates. Many (probably most) expected this support to be for both Wolfdale (dual core) and Yorkfield (quad core) Penryn CPUs. But, alas, it is not to be: it seems the only Wolfdale will be compatible with the 680i chipset.

Many will probably suggest that this solely an artificial limitation impressed on this chipset, while NVIDIA will probably suggest that there are some technical hiccups that are precluding Yorkfield support.

Many will also probably also suggest this limitiation was decided upon to help the sales of the soon-upcoming 780i chipset, which will support Yorkfields.

The 780i chipset is, a rehash of  the 680i chipset, with no earth-shattering improvements, but a few minor ones, such as ESA support (for better monitoring and tweaking of system components), PCIE 2.00 support (which doesn't help gamers very much at all right now), and support for 3-way SLI (for the hardcorest).

Update: the moderator has reposted, describing a hardware limitation that prevents Yorkfields running on the 680i:

"We can tell you it is a hardware limitation on the 680i board.  With the release of a new CPU sometimes it is not just a simple die shrink, even if the CPU draws less power there could be other specs and requirements.  The P35 chipset is Intel’s first chipset to support thier Yorkfield CPU’s.  The P35 was released June of 2007, the 680i motherboard launched Novemeber of 2006.  The 700 series motherboard will have the necessary changes to fully support the Yorkfield CPU’s.  I know this is not the best news we can bring you but we are doing everything we can at this time.  I will answer all questions as best as I can."

Hardware limitations or not, many 680i owners will still be saddened to hear that they will not be able to fully engage the power of the 4 core Penryn.