Incidently, the 24-pin main ATX power connector along side the DDR slots on the Gigabyte GA-8GPNXP Duo is backwards compatible with current 20-pin ATX power connectors. There are still very few 24-pin ATX power supplies on the market right now, so if you don't have one, you can postpone purchasing a new PSU for a little while longer. Just be sure that when you plug it into the board, you connect the pins in the proper manner.

Overall, I'd say the layout of the GA-8GPNXP Duo is pretty good, aside from the position of the main IDE and floppy drive headers. I really don't like them interfering with long PCI Express videocards, which is exactly what can happen with where they are located on the board.

The rest of the ports and headers are all at the edge of the motherboard which makes attaching peripherals easy when the board is in a chassis.

In a move to force consumers into adopting Serial ATA devices, Intel now only integrates one IDE controller into its ICH6 southbridge. While we can all agree that Serial ATA is the way of the future, the death of IDE is not necessarily imminent. It is with this thought in mind that we are pleased to discover Gigabyte have integrated an IDE RAID controller onto the GA-8GPNXP Duo. The controller is compatible with RAID modes 0, 1 and 0+1. If you like, you can just use the IDE drives in a standalone fashion.

If you're a networking nut, you're going to love the Gigabyte GA-8GPNXP Duo's with three network adaptors! First we have a Broadcom 5751 Gigabit NIC running through the PCI Express bus for those high bandwidth networking connections. Second up is the Marvel Gigabit ethernet controller which runs on the PCI bus.

Last but not least is an 802.11G wireless LAN card! With two 10/1000 Gigabit network connections, and a 802.11G wireless connection as well, you're pretty much covered on all fronts with this board.

As a bonus, it should be noted that the wireless network card included with the GA-8GPNXP Duo is not a proprietary design, and so it will work in other systems if you choose to use it elsewhere. Because of this flexibility, Gigabyte have included a low profile mounting bracket so the half-height WLAN card could be used in a 'book-style' small form factor PC.

While you can't use both DDR2 and DDR memory at the same time, the Intel 915P chipset does support both memory types.

This can help to make the transition from your stocks of DDR memory to the newer DDR-2 modules a little less expensive by allowing extra time to change over at your own pace, and budget.