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Test Setup 

Hardware for testing of the Gigabyte 6-Quad N680SLI-DQ6:

• Intel Core 2 E6400 processor (Socket LGA775, 2.66 GHz, two cores)
• XFX GeForce 7800 GT video card
• Western Digital WD1200JD SATA hard drive
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATA2 drive
• 2 * 1024 MB Corsair PC2-8500 memory @ 4-4-4-12/2T
• 2 * 1024 MB Corsair PC2-8888 memory @ 4-4-4-12/2T

The Gigabyte 6-Quad N680SLI-DQ6  will be duking it out with several other Core 2-compatible motherboards:

• Abit AB9 Pro (Intel P965, DDR2-800 @ 4-4-4-12/2T)
• Abit AW9D Max (Intel 975X, DDR2-800 @ 4-4-4-12/2T)
• Asus P5N32-E SLI (Nvidia 650i, DDR2-800 @ 4-4-4-12/2T)
• Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 (Intel P965, DDR2-910 @ 4-4-4-12/2T)
• MSI P965 Platinum (Intel P965, DDR2-800 @ 4-4-4-12/2T)
• MSI 975X Platinum (Intel 975X, DDR2-800 @ 4-4-4-12/2T)
• FoxConn 975X7AB (Intel 975X, DDR2-800 @ 4-4-4-12/2T)
• Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi (Intel P965, DDR2-800 @ 4-4-4-12/2T) but E6400 data taken from the E6400 review  

Benchmarks Used

For now, here is a listing of the tests performed:

• PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004
• PC Magazine Multimedia Content Creation 2004
• RightMark Memory Analyzer
• SiSoft Sandra 2007 CPU, MMX, Memory Benchmarks
• HDTach
• WinRAR 
• TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding
• XviD Video Encoding
• LAME MP3 Encoding
• Rightmark Audio*
• Call of Duty
• Doom 3
• Quake 4
• Comanche 4
• Halo
• Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
• Unreal Tournament 2004

Video drivers used were the NVIDIA ForceWare version 91.49 package.