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The Board

The Gigabyte 6-Quad    N680SLI-DQ6 comes in a large, fancy box where the whole outside of the box is printed on top of a holographic pattern - I'd hate to think how much that box adds to the price of the package!



You do get a quick start guide, a manual, SLI bridge, IO panel back plate, driver CD and an IO slot cover as well as two IO slot covers that provide two external SATA connectors  and a power connector each, four other SATA cables, an IDE cable and a floppy cable.



The motherboard  is an  understated blue  color,  and the copper heatsinks and heatpipes REALLY jump out at you!
 


Look at all those slots... three 32 bit PCI slots, one 1x PCIe, two 16x PCIe and one 8x PCIe... enough for an SLI configuration plus a third GPU for physics!



Just look at all those SATA ports!  Below you're looking no less than 10 total SATA2 ports for some crazy storage support.

Frankly, I don't like the right-angle ones, as it can be difficult to insert and remove cables into them once the board is built into a case, but I must admit, I really, really like having ten SATA ports. With 750GB drives being readily available, building a 7.5TB system is only a matter of spending money on the drives.



The heat pipes and heat sinks are quite massive, a bit too much so if you ask me - I could not use our regular Noctua-12 heatsink, and ended up using a ThermalRight Ultra 120  that performs similarly to the Noctua.



Below you can also see the additional heatsinks on the back of the board - unfortunately they also make mounting some heatsinks impossible - if the heatsinks come with those bottom of the board "X" supports.

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