Football team soundalike Gigabyte United - it's actually a joint venture between Gigabyte and Asus - has launched its self-styled "richly featured next-generation gaming platform" dubbed the Gigabyte 6-Quad.

The first board based on the platform's array of technologies is the GA-N680SLI-DQ6. It's unwieldly model number reveals the inclusion of an Nvidia nForce 680i SLI chipset. The board plays host to an Intel Core 2 Extreme quad-core processor over a 1,333MHz frontside bus.

For SLI, the board has a pair of x16 PCI Express slots, and there's an additional, 8x slot for a third graphics card to run physics calculations.

The 6-Quad technologies include not only the four-core processor support, a suitably tweaked BIOS and Quad SLI support but also four Gigabit Ethernet ports, four eSATA ports and a four-GPU ready triple-phase power supply.

Gigabyte and Asus announced the foundation of Gigabyte United in November 2006. ®