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Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI nForce4-SLI Motherboard Review
Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI nForce4-SLI Motherboard Review - PCSTATS
If you consider yourself a performance enthusiast and are contemplating purchasing a new system or motherboard in the near future, do yourself a favor and get something that's SLI compatible.
 88% Rating:   
Filed under: Motherboards Published:  Author: 
External Mfg. Website: Gigabyte Feb 25 2005   C. Sun  
Home > Reviews > Motherboards > Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI

A great motherboard with a bright future!

Back in the "motherboard dark ages", most manufacturers didn't integrate many features into their boards. Not only that, most companies didn't include the necessary cables and brackets that you'd need to take advantage of the few components they did include.

Gigabyte has a pretty good reputation of tossing in all the bits and bobs with its fully featured boardS. Other manufacturers often integrate many features as well, but what good is it if you need to go out and buy that USB or IEEE 1394b bracket first?!

Today we had the pleasure of looking at Gigabyte's brand spanking new GA-K8NXP-SLI motherboard. Aside from overclocking options, the GA-K8NXP-SLI has everything you'd ever want from a motherboard...

We've never seen a board this well equipped before! Included are two Gigabit NIC's (neither of which run on the PCI bus), an additional four-port SATA RAID controller which is capable of running RAID 5, three IEEE 1394b ports, four SATA II ports, an onboard 7.1 audio codec, dual BIOS', and a PCI 802.11g wireless network card for good measure!

Overall the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI performed very well in the whole slew of benchmarks that we ran. It was slightly slower than the rest of the boards in SYSmark2004, and showed some memory bandwidth pinching, but everything else was pretty close.

The 3D performance of the GA-K8NXP-SLI was very good both with the single MSI X800XT based videocard and the two GeForce 6600GTs in SLI mode. When viewing the 3D numbers, it's impressive to see what SLI brings to the table.

Our particular motherboard didn't overclock very well, only being able to hit 214 MHz. Likewise, driver improvements should also help this board net better performance numbers. There's no doubt that nForce4 SLI motherboards are expensive and with that in mind the price of the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI shouldn't surprise you at $229 CDN ($185 US). If you're looking for the best you have to be prepared to spend the money for it, and the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI is definitely worth the money.

PCSTATS Recommended Product Award

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Contents of Article: Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI
 Pg 1.  Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI nForce4-SLI Motherboard Review
 Pg 2.  SATA II and SLI
 Pg 3.  nForce4 Technology Loving
 Pg 4.  Disk Improvements
 Pg 5.  More Storage Features
 Pg 6.  Overclocking and BIOS
 Pg 7.  Benchmarks: SYSmark 2004
 Pg 8.  Benchmarks: Winstone 2004, Winbench 99
 Pg 9.  Benchmarks: SiSoft Sandra 2004, Super Pi
 Pg 10.  Benchmarks: PCMark04, 3DMark2001
 Pg 11.  Benchmarks: 3DMark05, AquaMark3
 Pg 12.  Benchmarks: Comanche 4, X2: The Threat, UT2003
 Pg 13.  Benchmarks: UT2004, Doom 3
 Pg 14.  — A great motherboard with a bright future!

 
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