Closer Look

So, Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI is a feature-rich products with tons of various controllers that comes with the whole lot of additional components. So, when you assemble a system with this mainboard, you will hardly lack any additional expansion devices, besides the graphics card. Moreover, many functions of this mainboard may not be even used at all.

As for the basic feature of this product, such as the supported CPU and memory types, Gigabyte engineers didn’t manage to stand out in any way. Like the majority of platforms for Socket 939 CPUs, the mainboard works fine with all single-core Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX and dual-core Athlon 64 X2 processors. The latest BIOS versions feature fully-fledged support for K8 revision E cores, which implies that this platform will work fine with any dual-channel memory up to DDR500 SDRAM.

There are four color-coded DIMM slots on the mainboard: you should install memory modules in pairs into the DIMM slots of the same color to enable dual-channel mode. Note that the DIMM slots referring to the same memory channel are located in pairs, so when you install only two memory modules they will be right next to one another, which may not be very good from the cooling prospective.

There are two PCI Express x16 slots for video cards on Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard. In the single-card mode the graphics card should be installed into the slot that is closer to the CPU socket. The second PCI Express x16 slot will then work as PCI Express x2. In the SLI mode when there are two identical GeForce graphics cards installed into the system, both PCI Express X16 slots turn into PCI Express x8 slots. Gigabyte engineers decided to save time and trouble working with additional logics, so the work mode for the PCI Express lots on Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard is set up in a traditional way: by installing a special SLI Switch Card one way or another. The slot for this card is located right in-between the two PCI Express slots.

Besides the above listed expansion slots, there are two PXI Express x1 slots and two PCI slots on the mainboard. At first glance, these slots may seem too few, but since Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI is a highly integrated feature-rich product already, these slots will most likely remain unused anyway. You will probably use only one of the PCI slots to install the WLAN add-on card that comes with the mainboard.

By the way, this card is based on Ralink 2560F chip and hence supports all today’s wireless standards: IEEE 802.11a/b/g. the software supplied with this card allows using it in Ad Hoc mode as well as in Infrastructure mode. Moreover, the card can work as a software access point allowing to connect up to 31 clients. So, the WiFi network users will be able to easily establish wireless networks or connect to the already existing networks with the help of the hardware and software supplied with the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard.