I was somewhat mystified, then, when Gigabyte's N680SLI-DQ6 arrived on my doorstep. With a little help from Nvidia's nForce 680i SLI chipset, this board packs a whopping ten Serial ATA ports and four Gigabit Ethernet options—more SATA and GigE than my last three workstations put together. Add in loads of Firewire ports and onboard audio that boasts Dolby Digital Live and DTS encoding, and the DQ6 easily boasts the most impressive array of onboard peripherals on the market.

The DQ6 isn't just a conduit for a high-end chipset and a dizzying array of peripheral ports, though. It's also outfitted with the most extravagant chipset cooler to grace a motherboard, and it comes with the smartest external Serial ATA implementation we've seen to date. Did I mention that it overclocks with aplomb, too?

Perhaps, when done right, high-end motherboards aren't such a tough sell after all. We've put the N680SLI-DQ6 through its paces against a slew of competitors to find out, with surprising results.

Board specs
With more onboard peripherals than we've seen from any other desktop motherboard, the N680SLI-DQ6's spec sheet is bursting at the seams with goodies.

Nvidia's flagship nForce 680i SLI chipset anchors the N680SLI-DQ6, providing the board with gobs of PCI Express connectivity in addition to six Serial ATA RAID ports and two hardware-accelerated Gigabit Ethernet controllers. This is the original 680i SLI, too, not its low-calorie LT cousin.

Yet not even the full-fat 680i SLI has enough connectivity options to sate the N680SLI-DQ6. Gigabyte also throws in a couple of Marvell Gigabit Ethernet controllers to boost the number of networking options to four, and two Gigabyte-branded Serial ATA RAID chips take the number of SATA ports up to 10. These auxiliary peripheral chips all ride the PCI Express bus, so there's no need to worry about sharing PCI bandwidth, either. However, because the four extra SATA ports are provided by a pair of two-port storage controllers, you can't run three- or four-drive arrays across them. For massive arrays, you'll have to stick to the six SATA ports that branch off the 680i SLI MCP.

The 680i SLI SPP offers support for "Azalia" High Definition Audio, which Gigabyte complements with Realtek's voluptuous ALC888DD codec chip. The ALC888DD is as high-end as Realtek codecs get, offering a signal-to-noise rating of 96dB for its DACs. You also get support for on-the-fly Dolby Digital Live and DTS encoding, although that's all done in software, so there will be a CPU utilization hit involved. Still, that's a nice option to have if you want to run surround speakers through a single optical cable.

A Texas Instruments Firewire chip rounds out the DQ6's impressive array of connectivity options. Gigabyte used to spec "Firewire 800" 1394b chips on its high-end boards, but they've gone back to plain old 1394a this time around, perhaps in part to avoid the hassles surrounding 1394b support in Windows XP.