Gigabyte N680SLI-DQ6 - A Mother Of A Motherboard

MojoKid writes "Motherboards manufacturers seem to get more exotic in their designs, with each new chipset release. HotHardware has an evaluation posted looking at the Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6; a product that seemingly out does every other current desktop motherboard in a number of key areas. The board features four Gigabit LAN controllers, 10 SATA ports, a 12-phase power array, 100% solid-state capacitors, and a unique wrap-around, passive, cooling apparatus that cools both the top and underside of the chipset and CPU socket area. And because the board is based on NVIDIA's nForce 680i SLI chipset, it also has three full-length PCI Express x16 slots for multi-GPU support. It's a good overclocker and performed well throughout the benchmarks."

Why?

[hcdejong]

Why stick so many ports (4x LAN, 10x SATA) on the motherboard? Is there a performance benefit to putting those ports there, instead of providing lots of PCI slots so you can create your own optimal mix of ports?

Re:Tech Review Site

[shawn(at)fsu]

And I would visit your review site provided you don't use those god awful double underlined adds..... Sorry for the rant but those things drive me crazy, they hardly ever are relevant to the context to the way the word is used and they come up just by moving the mouse over them....

Re:Tech Review Site

[Enderandrew]

And I shouldn't split two pages of content over 12 pages just to generate more ad hits?

Re:Why?

[magarity]

Two reasons: Slots cost more during manufacturing than headers. And modern video cards with hugemongous heatsinks overlap at least one of the spare slots (mine has a passive heatsink and takes up 2 other slots plus the one its plugged into) so slots are really less useful than having ports built in elsewhere.

Re:Why?

[compro01]

Sheesh, get with the times.

tell that to the optical drive manufacturers. it is still problematic to find SATA optical drives at reasonable cost.

Re:Why?

[Control Group]

I don't know about that...how many PCIe 16x slots do you use in an average server? How much do you care if your MB runs silent in your average data center? What do you need 10 USB ports, or even a single Firewire port for in a DL380? Or an optical audio output?

No, this board looks to me like it's exactly what they're marketing it as: a mainboard for the home enthusiast.

Re:Why?

[SatanicPuppy]

That wasn't what leapt out at me...What leapt out at me was "All those SATA ports, and NO RAID"

Unless you're going to be buying a craptacular "fake raid" card, you're going to be paying hundreds of dollars for a card that can handle these drives, so it's a good thing the damn board comes with extra PCI express slots, especially since you're more likely to find a PCI-X raid card, and there are no PCI-X slots on this board (and good luck trying to fit it into a PCI slot, with all that extra crap on the board).

All that SATA with no RAID suggests that all the extra SATA slots are just epeen. All the board real estate used on things that you don't need multiples of, just so you're forced to blow a card slot to make up for it.

Maybe I'm missing something, but...

[NerveGas]

... what, precisely, do you do with a desktop motherboard where you need four gigabit ethernet connections?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Software RAID is very nice.

With the older NVIDIA boards, after the 6th SATA port you had to use up one of your PCIe slots for a RAID card (or a SATA interface card). With one of these boards, that ceases to be an issue (personally, I want 16 ports and a ECC RAM setup).