Gigabyte cooks up own recipe for nForce 680i SLI
It may be a little late to the party, but Gigabyte has just introduced a motherboard based on Nvidia's nForce 680i SLI chipset. Unlike 680i SLI offerings from the likes of eVGA and Biostar, the snappily named GA-N680SLI-DQ6 isn't a rebadged Nvidia reference design. Instead, Gigabyte has gone its own way, most visibly by installing a copper, heat pipe-based cooler that extends from the chipset to the power regulation circuitry. 
Gigabyte's GA-N680SLI-DQ6. Source: Gigabyte. The board's layout is somewhat different from the reference design we tested last year, too. Gigabyte has swapped one of the PCI Express x1 slots for a 32-bit PCI slot and raised the SATA port total from six to 10. Gigabyte says the GA-N680SLI-DQ6 has four eSATA ports, but those aren't on the rear port cluster, so they likely come in an expansion slot bracket. The port cluster does include a whopping four Gigabit Ethernet ports, however. Gigabyte says those can be combined into two 2Gbps connections, should you somehow need the extra bandwidth.
Gigabyte's GA-N680SLI-DQ6. Source: Gigabyte.
- Zune can't party like it's 2009[89]
- Apple announces king-size MacBook Pro, less DRM for iTunes[84]
- First Windows 7 beta outruns Vista, XP[75]
- The Onion: Apple launches revolutionary, keyboard-free laptop[63]
- Macworld 2009: I don't blame you, Steve[61]
- Etc.[60]
- Our Christmas giveaway has a winner![58]