nVIDIA were the first chipset manufacturer other than AMD to support the 64-bit AMD Opteron processor. Titled the "Crush 8," or nForce3 when it was first released, the chipset also promised to support the then forthcoming 64-bit AMD desktop processors which would later be named the Athlon64 and Athlon64 FX.

The release of the Athlon64 CPU has come and gone, but remarkably for nVidia which had such a head start in the K8-chipset industry, theirs is not the most popular solution. Rather, Athlon64 motherboards based on the nVidia nForce3 chipset are few and far between at the moment, though in talking with many motherboard manufacturers that situation is expected to change latter in the year.

The K8 chipset of the moment is the VIA K8T800, and there are plenty of examples of how boards based on that core logic perform... In this review, we are going to be evaluating nVidia's nForce 3 150 chipset and specifically, Gigabyte's GA-K8NNXP socket 754 Athlon64 motherboard.

Gigabyte's brand new K8NNXP Athlon64 motherboard boasts an impressive list of features, workstation-oriented addons, and performance stats that should make it a crowd favorite among demanding users. The full-size ATX motherboard is equipped with three DDR DIMM sockets that will support up to 3GB of PC3200 ECC/non-ECC memory.