Gigabyte's N680SLI-DQ6

Zitat

The N680SLI-DQ6 doesn't appear to be selling online at the moment, but Gigabyte says the board should be available soon with a suggested retail price of $309. That's hardly chump change, but it's not entirely unreasonable considering that Asus' flagship Striker Extreme sells for around the same price. And the Striker doesn't have nearly the same array of Serial ATA and Gigabit Ethernet options as the DQ6.

Those extra onboard peripherals, coupled with Gigabyte's novel approach to eSATA support, are really what set the DQ6 apart from the rest of the field. Throw in a gorgeous passive heatpipe cooler effective enough to handle front-side bus speeds up to 480MHz and solid-state capacitors that should increase the useful life of the board, and you have quite a compelling package.

That's not to say that the DQ6 is perfect, mind you. Gigabyte would do well to provide more extensive fan speed controls in its BIOS, and they should have made more USB options available in the port cluster, along with a digital S/PDIF input. But those are minor gripes at best.

At the end of the day, high-end boards aren't going to offer the same value proposition as mid-range products. But even with a price tag that stretches north of $300, the N680SLI-DQ6 doesn't feel like a rip-off. Sure it's expensive, and it's not any faster than a decent mid-range board. But if you take into account all the extras, the attention to detail, and the phenomenal overclocking potential, the DQ6 is exactly what a high-end motherboard should be.

Zitat von rider

Wow, für was braucht man 4 RJ45?