To give the Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Quad Royal its ability to use four PCI Express x16 videocards, Gigabyte equips the board with the nVidia nForce4 SLI C19 Intel Edition chipset (Northbridge) and the nForce4 SLI CK804 chipset (as Southbridge). Both chipsets are connected via an undocumented bus, but if I had to bet I'd say it was a HyperTransport connection.

Both the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition and nForce4 SLI AMD Edition chipsets individually support four Serial ATA II channels, however only the CK804 Serial ATA II channels are made available. It would have been nice if Gigabyte could have placed all eight Serial ATA II channels on the PCB... but finding the space for it would probably be difficult.

It's nice to see that neither of the Gigabit network cards integrated into the Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Quad Royal motherboard run through the PCI bus. The Agere ET1310 is a PCI Express x1 device and the Marvell 88E1111 has its own special connection to the nForce4 SLI AMD Edition Southbridge.

The Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Quad Royal motherboard natively supports 24 pin power supplies with an 8 pin ATX12V connector. If the power supply you're using is slightly older that's okay because the socket is compatible with 20 pin PSU's that use the regular 4 pin ATX12V connector. Just make sure there is enough power to go around. A PSU with 30+ Amps on the 12V line is recommended when using four high powered PCI Express videocards.

Overall the manual is well written however the section covering SLI is a bit confusing and Gigabyte could have done a better job here. Novice users will most likely need help from more experienced friends when installing the Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Quad Royal motherboard to its full potential... Gigabyte equip the GA-8N-SLI Quad Royal with KZG capacitors which are manufactured in Japan. Traditionally Japanese capacitors are of higher quality.

Next up, we take a closer look at what makes this motherboard really special..