Gigabyte N680SLI-DQ6

Gigabyte continues with its DQ6 series boards. Earlier we review their Intel P965 based DQ6 board and found that it was top notch. All DQ6 stands for is ‘six quad’. This means the motherboard features or supports 6 things that are grouped in a quad or four. Even though this is just a marketing scheme, the DQ6 features are very useful and set the board apart from others. We’ll go through each feature in detail as we look over the motherboard.

Gigabyte’s attention to layout is great. Near the CPU socket, they minimized the obstructions so larger aftermarket coolers could fit. Their Silent Pipe cooling stretches across the whole motherboard and even over the rear ports at the top of the board. Near the Silent Pipe assembly you see two of the six Quad features. The first is Quad Core support. The Gigabyte N680SLI-DQ6 supports Intel’s quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700/QX6800 and Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPUs.

The next feature is Gigabyte’s quad triple-phase (12 phase) power. Even the more expensive ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard that we’ll be looking at later only has 8 phase power. Gigabyte’s 12-phase power delivery system ensures the most stable power delivery at the most extreme voltages.

The expansion slots are very standard. The blue PCI Express Graphics (PEG) slots are 16x, while the middle PEG slot is only 8x. This third graphics slot is for future SLI physics support. Although the board only has two slots designed for SLI graphics, the board supports Quad SLI in the form of two GPUs per board. In case NVIDIA decides to make the 8x00 cards in the quad SLI flavor, Gigabyte guarantees compatibility. As you may have guessed, this is yet another Quad feature.

In between the expansion slots you can see that all capacitors are solid. They are more expensive, but are much higher quality than standard capacitors. They also help with tweaking exact frequencies. Solid-state capacitors last about 5 times longer as well.


Here are the various controllers on the motherboard. The first is the Texas Instruments Firewire controller. Next are three of the four Marvell controllers for the four Gigabit LAN ports. This brings up the next Quad feature. Unlike any other motherboard that we have tested, the N680SLI-DQ6 has 4 Ethernet ports. This is great for a server or a gateway PC. Four gigabit ports can also support two 2 gigabit connections through DualNet and Teaming, both technologies exclusively available only with NVIDIA’s nForce 500 and 600 chipsets.

Next we have the Realtek ALC888 codec supporting HD Azalia audio with 8 channels. Finally, we see the crowded lower right corner of the motherboard with a myriad of connectors. At the top of the photo you can see 6 yellow SATA2 connectors provided by the 680i MCP chip. There also three yellow headers for 6 USB2.0 ports. In the very corner is the battery. We didn’t picture the BIOS chips but they’re a little over. This is one of the most important quad features this board has to offer. Gigabyte pioneered the DualBIOS technology to prevent faulty flashes and dead motherboards. Now Gigabyte added Xpress BIOS Recovery software into each of its BIOS chips and this has become QuadBIOS. It ensures four copies of the BIOS between the motherboard and hard disk, so you can recover the BIOS if anything happens.

The final quad feature of the motherboard is quad external SATA ports. The two Gigabyte controllers support the four purple ports which could be used for both external and internal SATA purposes. Unlike most motherboards which have eSATA ports on the back panel, Gigabyte provides expansion slot brackets with the ports on them. This might actually not be feasible if you have two dual slot video cards and other expansion cards and fill up all of the rear openings, but considering how crowded the back panel on the DQ6 is, we can understand why Gigabyte mounts the eSATA ports on a separate expansion bracket.


The back panel is fairly standard except for the 4 Ethernet ports. Gigabyte also includes a serial port, which have long been excluded on top end motherboards along with other legacy ports such as the parallel port. The four 240pin DDR2 slots were a
Quad feature on the previous DQ6 board, but not anymore, because there are more important quad features now. The ITE monitoring chips is a standard, as are the single IDE and floppy ports. There is also a Molex connector for more power when using SLI and overclocking.

Overclocking

Gigabyte’s BIOS is very easy to navigate. You must pres CTRL + F1 to access DRAM and Voltage settings. This is a smart idea to protect the motherboard from inexperienced users. Our initial tests with the F2 BIOS resulted in failures to boot occasionally even at stock settings. However, the F3 BIOS changed everything. We were able to stably run the motherboard at an amazing 528FSB (2112FSB effective). That greatly surpasses our EVGA board which did 451FSB (1804 FSB effective).

Let’s move on the ASUS’s flagship motherboard, the Striker Extreme.