Among the unique features of this mainboard that distinguish it from the other NVIDIA nForce4 SLI based solutions I would like to mention the support of a lot of IDE devices. Besides the standard two Parallel ATA-133 ports and four Serial ATA II ports offered by the chipset, the mainboard also carried four additional Serial ATA ports implemented via the Silicon Image 3114 controller. So, Gigabyte with a GA-K8NXP-SLI you can connect up to 8 SATA hard disk drives altogether. Moreover, these drives can be combined into RAID arrays. The chipset IDE controller supports RAID 0, 1 and 0+1, and the additional Silicon Image controller allows creating RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5. However, we still cannot claim that the SiI3114 chip offers higher Serial ATA functionality than the nForce4 SLI chipset. SiI3114 doesn’t support SATA II interface to the full extent: it can boast neither the NCQ, nor the 3Gbit/s data transfer rate. Moreover, this controller is quite old already, so its PCI interface can theoretically limit its performance quite noticeably. Besides, RAID 5 support offered by the SiI3114 controller is implemented mostly in the software rather than hardware. All in all, there is nothing really special about this chip.

Like all other mainboards based on NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset, Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI features 10 USB 2.0 ports. Four of them are available on the mainboard rear panel, and the remaining 6 are laid out as pin-connectors on the PCB. Since the mainboard comes with three brackets carrying the USB ports, the system built on Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI will feature all 10 USB ports even if the system case will have none.

The second popular interface for external devices, FireWire, is not supported by the NVIDIA chipset, therefore Gigabyte engineers had to integrate additional controllers. There are a couple of microchips on the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard that are responsible for the IEEE1394 support. They are the physical and logical TI controllers: TSB81BA3 and TSB82AA2.

Although this dual-chip solution is a pretty rare thing, it boasts a few indisputable advantages. The main one is IEEE1394b support, which allows the three FireWire ports laid out as pin-connectors can offer 800Mbit/s data transfer rate. There is a special bracket with two ports in the mainboard accessories bundle.

The sound solution implemented on Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI is quite standard for most NVIDIA nForce4 SLI mainboards. This platform uses the chipset sound and the Realtek ALC850 AC’97 codec. This codec has been used on mainboards for quite a while now, so we won’t dwell on its detailed characteristics again here. As for the sound quality provided by Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard, here are some measurement results:

The networking features of the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset have already become the talk of the town a while ago. Of course, Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI uses the Gigabit controller built into this chipset that features hardware filters for network packets. Besides there is another Gigabit network controller – Marvell 8053 – connected to the high-performance PCI x1 bus. This way, a system based on Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI can serve not only as a high-speed home entertainment and gaming system, but also as a home server solution.