BIOS

Gigabyte's BIOS on the N680SLI-DQ6 is essentially the nVidia reference BIOS placed under the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker(M.I.T) menu. Thanks to nVidia, there is no reason not to have decent overclocking on any 680i based board. So if you get a bum steer on overclockability, blame your board vendor.

Frequencies

CPU Host Frequency: 100MHz to 650MHz in 1MHz Increments

Memory Frequency: 400MHz to 1400MHz in 1MHz Increments

PCI-E X16 Slot 1: 100MHz to 131MHz in 1MHz Increments

PCI-E X16 Slot 2: 100MHz to 131MHz in 1MHz Increments

PCI-E x8 Clock: 100MHz to 131MHz in 1MHz Increments

Voltages

DDR2 Voltage Control: 1.8v to 2.575v in 0.025v Increments

NB/PCIE Voltage: +0.05v to +0.35v in 0.05v Increments

SB/PCIE Voltage: +0.05v to +0.75v in 0.05v Increments

HT Link Voltage: +0.05v to +0.35v in 0.05v Increments

SB Standby Voltage: +0.05v to +0.15v in 0.05v Increments

CPU Voltage Control: 1.1v to 2.25v in 0.025v Increments

Overclocking

With all these settings and using the F3 revision BIOS version, we managed a maximum and extremely impressive FSB result of 520MHz completely stable under Windows to complete our tests with DDR-2 voltage at 2.4v, CPU voltage at 1.45v and the rest of the voltages at full max settings.

What does this all mean? Well, quite basically it is the BEST FSB overclock we have ever attained from any motherboard since we started testing them about eight years ago. Congratulations to Gigabyte for reaching such an extreme level of overclockability but we don't expect it to end there as companies continue to try and outdo each other.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we don't have enough time to tweak the motherboard to the maximum and find the highest possible FSB as this could take days to properly find. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking or as new BIOS updates are released or "burn in" time might come into play if you believe in that.