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.
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