As for the overall mainboard design, it is quite thorough and well-done, though we don’t feel like praising it too much as well. Of course, the presence of all those numerous controllers resulted into the slightly bigger number of additional connectors on the PCB. And unfortunately, Gigabyte engineers didn’t manage to locate these connectors in the best way, so that nothing could be in the way during the system assembly. As a result, the installation of the expansion cards, especially the full-size ones, can become a pretty complicated task.

Speaking about the PCB design flaws on Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI we can’t help mentioning the fact that all expansion slots are moved away from the CPU. That is actually why there are so few of them. If you assemble a system with two graphics cards on this mainboard, then you will only have one PCI and one PCI Express x1 slot left at your disposal, because the other slots will be blocked by the massive cooling systems of the VGA cards. Although, you may not need more than that, because, as we have already mentioned, Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI is a very feature-rich product.

The mainboard appeared slightly noisier than we have expected. The chipset cooler with a pretty original design is rather quiet, however, the active cooler on the K8DPS voltage regulator daughter card is the one that generates most noise. If the noise is bothering you too much, you can simply remove the cooler from the voltage regulator card, as we have already mentioned above: it will do no harm.

The rotation speeds of the chipset cooler and the cooler on K8DPS card cannot be adjusted, unfortunately. Therefore, they are always working at their maximum speed. Besides, the mainboard doesn’t send out any signals in case one of them fails.

To reduce the noise generated by the CPU cooler, Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard offers special tools. The BIOS of this board allows controlling the CPU fan rotation speed with the help of Gigabyte’s own SmartFan technology. With this technology the mainboard BIOS Setup allows building the dependence of the CPU fan rotation speed on the CPU temperature by entering five reference values. And this is certainly more than enough not only for common users but also for hardware geeks. Especially, since this mainboard also supports Cool’n’Quiet technology.

However, we should stress that the fan rotation speed management is available only for the CPU cooler. Moreover, the CPU temperature is actually the only temperature value Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI can control and monitor.

The rear panel of the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI board is quite standard. There are two PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse, one parallel and one serial port, four High Speed USB ports, two RJ45 network ports with the LED indicators, six audio jacks, a coaxial SPDIF In and Out.