Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6

There's no kill quite like overkill.

Given the exemplary performance of Gigabyte’s 965 solutions, we’ve been expecting its 680i contribution for a while now. Suddenly and unexpectedly it turned up – a sledge hammer blow to the face of all competition, this thing was designed with the idea that just like Sam and Fuzzy's robot NDA enforcer, overkill is just one of its many modes.

If the four Gigabit Ethernet ports – two Marvell, two NVIDIA – won’t convince you, then the 10 SATA ports – six controlled by NVIDIA’s MCH, the remaining four by two rebranded JMicron controllers – certainly will. The four eSATA ports provided on two separate expansion brackets and their associated cabling serves to seal the deal, with a side order of four SATA cables, one FDD, one HDD, an SLI bridge and an SLI retention bracket.

We’d love to find a feasible reason for all the network cables and SATA ports – but all we can think of is a ridiculously traffic-laden storage system with several unique volumes present. You’d want to throw in a quad-core chip and a pair of 8800GTXs just to do the board justice. Perhaps the extra SATA ports could also be there so the eSATA expansion brackets steal nothing away. But still, this board is for a very exclusive part of the market, especially considering the heinous price. Amusingly, it’s still cheaper than ASUS’s Striker, despite the bucketload of extra features.

The BIOS is certainly flexible enough, although it complies to Gigabyte’s annoying policy on hiding decent overclocking menus, requiring you to hit Ctrl+F1 at the main screen. After this is done, access to Advanced Chipset Features, such as caching the system BIOS, GPU Ex and LinkBoost, and RAM timings are unlocked. Once again we mourn the non-use of NVIDIA’s own BIOS, but we suppose the vendors have to differentiate themselves somehow.

Despite the 680i’s well known overheating northbridge there is no additional fan included. While Gigabyte’s heatpipe solution is definitely excellent, the northbridge held us back in the overclocking stakes, only managing to reach 478MHz Orthos stable. While this is still an excellent result, the 965s on average perform better, once again highlighting that you’d only buy an NVIDIA solution if you wanted SLI.

A Dolby Digital-capable Realtek ALC888 chip is included for 7.1 sound and the usual smattering of I/O ports sit at the back – the differences being a mini-FireWire port in preference to coax S/PDIF, and while the parallel port is gone the serial remains.

Gigabyte has continued with its solid capacitors, and considering it has done incredibly well in the market it looks set to continue using them from the top of its range right through to the bottom. This is a good thing, and significantly more reliable than the standard caps still found on most boards.

At first appearances the ‘CrazyCool 2’ heatsink attached under the socket seems to negate the use of CPU HSFs with custom backplates – however this is removed easily enough with judicious application of a screwdriver and thumbs.

Performance was on par with other 680i and 965P solutions, but with the expected price we just can’t find a reason why this is worth it, short of bragging rights.

Buy it if your grandmother is coated in gold.

	Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6
Everest memory read (MB/s)	7332
Everest memory write (MB/s)	4886
Everest memory latency (ms)	54.5
wPrime 32MB (s)	29.89
SuperPiMod 1.5	1:45.406
3DMark06 (3DMarks)	11844