IntroductionIt’s no secret that Intel’s Core 2 platform is the hottest thing since the Beatles, and companies are lining up to make chipsets for this king of the desktop processors. SiS has already got chips available, Intel has as always had its own platform chips and even AMD/ATI has its Crossfire 3200 Intel Edition. Although, in our opinion the best player in the performance and enthusiast chipset realm is nVidia.
nVidia’s nForce 680i chipset solution is definitely no slouch when it comes to performance, overclocking and its rich array of onboard features thanks to a no holds barred philosophy from nVidia - if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.
680i has already proved to be a highly powerful chip that has the cornerstone of the dual graphics card market thanks to SLI, and with its emphasis of enthusiast level performance, overclocking is usually extremely impressive.
Gigabyte in true form has taken up this new chipset as part of their Dual Quad series. And while the Taiwanese motherboard group has been much slower to release their 680i product, they’ve finally done it and we quite interested to find out if the wait has been worth it or not.
Labelled the N680SLI-DQ6, we can only expect the best, as only the best and brightest get the DQ6 naming treatment from Gigabyte. Let’s see if the impressive DQ6 line of motherboards continues as we shoot for the highest ever FSB overclock ever recorded in our labs.
