Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6: Quad to the Extreme

First Impressions

There you have it: a first glimpse at a very interesting board that tries to be everything to everyone with just about every possible option you could logically fit on a board. We were impressed that all of the options worked as advertised and we actually have the board running Vista Ultimate x64 without an issue at this time. Whether there is a user base that needs a board with Quad Gigabit LAN and ten SATA ports is open for debate but our hats are off to Gigabyte for getting all of the various options to work together.

The performance of the board is very solid but considering the time it took to get to market we did expect slightly better performance and a more polished BIOS. After several weeks of stability and compatibility testing with a wide range of components we did not find too many issues with our early release board. The majority of the problems we did find were immediately fixed by Gigabyte. Hopefully, Gigabyte will provide us with a released F3 BIOS shortly that addresses a few remaining issues.


You might ask what those issues are since we did not provide a full in-depth review of each option on this board in our preview. Our first issue deals with memory performance. This board does not like 1T Command Rates at DDR2-800; we have not had this issue on the ASUS boards and luckily our EVGA reference board seems to like 1T operation also. We had numerous issues when 1T was working correctly at DDR2-800 that ranged from data corruption to random shutdowns. This has been fixed since the F3A BIOS but now we have to overclock the memory past DDR2-811 to get 1T operation - this is more like an annoyance than a real problem, but it still needs to be addressed. At least on the F3A BIOS we found 1T operation was very stable from DDR2-811 to DDR2-880 with our high end memory from OCZ and Corsair. This is not the case with the F3B BIOS or the shipping F2 BIOS when utilizing 1GB modules. While performance might only vary up to 3% with 1T enabled, it is still a choice we would like to have after shelling out over $279 for the board.

Our next issue is the lack of viable overclocking with our quad core processors. While most people would not be too worried about this or might simply raise the multiplier to reach high CPU speeds with the QX6700, we consider it to be a problem when the boards will not reach at least 333FSB. The reason for this is that the upcoming 1333FSB (Quad Pumped) quad core processors will require the 333FSB base. When these hit the market we have to wonder if these boards will perform as advertised. The E6850 (1333FSB Dual Core) works without an issue on this board and we understand the new quad cores will also, but it has been almost four months since the release of the 680i chipset and we are still seeing this problem.

Fortunately, some of the early issues that plagued the reference boards are not present on this particular board and beta BIOS. We had no issues enabling RAID, SLI, and using the on-board Realtek ALC-888DD codec together. We are still not fond of the EAX compatibility and audio quality of the Realtek HD codecs as the ADI chipsets simply sound better. More importantly, they correctly generate EAX 2.0 audio streams and overall have slightly better audio quality. However, if you are a serious gamer or audiophile you will likely already have a discrete sound card, making audio concerns something of a moot point.

We still have significant testing left to complete on our new retail kit but at this time we like the progress the 680i chipset has made as well as Gigabyte's implementation. The performance of this early production board has been very good and stability has not been a real issue until the board was at or near its limits - limits that probably will not satisfy the extreme computer enthusiast but should be enough for the majority of potential owners.

We can say the additional features such as Quad Gigabit Ethernet, SLI combined with our AGEIA physics card, RAID capability on the additional four SATA 3Gb/s ports via the two JMicron JMB363 chipsets, and enhancements like LinkBoost, SLI Ready Memory, and IEEE-1394 all work as advertised. We found memory compatibility was greatly improved from previous Gigabyte releases as our ProMOS and Elpida modules worked fine. We would like to see some additional memory and overclocking performance tuning completed by Gigabyte but overall the BIOS releases are very solid if not spectacular.

We think the Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6 has a bright future in the enthusiast performance market based upon solid performance, an incredible amount of features, and more importantly the support we expect Gigabyte to provide to the owners of this board. It might not ever be the best performing 680i board but no one can question it beats all other boards when it comes time to roll out the bling-bling.