Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI Mainboard Review

by Ilya Gavrichenkov
12/05/2005 | 07:10 PM

We posted the first reviews of mainboards based on chipsets from nForce4 core logic family early this year. Now it is the end of November already, however, the situation with Socket 939 mainboards remained pretty much the same. NVIDIA’s chipsets for Athlon 64 processors remain the best choice so far from various standpoints. Here I should certainly mention high performance, rich functionality, and of course excellent stability of all nForce4 based mainboards. Although the alternative chipset developers lay themselves out trying to push their own solutions into the market, NVIDIA’s chipsets still receive our best response.

However, we shouldn’t suspect that the market for Socket 939 platforms has stagnated. First of all, nForce4 chipsets meet all the latest requirements, despite the fact that they have been out there for a while now. In fact, the only significant drawback of these chipsets is the absence of High Definition Audio support. Secondly, NVIDIA engineers do not keep their hands in pockets: the company has completed the development of a more up-to-date version of this chipset: nForce4 SLI x16. This product allows implementing two PCI Express x16 slots on the mainboard PCB. Besides, NVIDIA distributed major system functions and controller between different chips. This way the developer is preparing better ground for further evolution of its products that will be stimulated by the launch of new processor form-factors (Socket M2) and expansion of their features.

The launch of NVIDIA nForce4 SLI x16 chipset, which will now be the most advanced core logic solution for Athlon 64 platform, is very likely to affect the entire market. This chipset will oust the common nForce4 SLI from its positions. In other words, the most expensive mainboards priced at $150+ will move to this particular new chipset model – nForce4 SLI x16. The mainboards that have been in this price category until now will inevitably drop in price.

In other words, nForce4 SLI based mainboards will become more affordable and hence will attract even more attention. Unfortunately, these mainboards will not allow you to get the maximum performance from a pair of graphics cards. However, dual-graphics card configurations are still a pretty niche solution and most users are very unlikely to go for a powerful graphics subsystem like that in the near future. Therefore, nForce4 SLI based platforms will be quite enough for the majority of users out there. On the one hand, their cost will be not that high, and on the other they feature all contemporary functions and even allow using a pair of graphics cards, although not to the 100% of their potential efficiency.

Well, everything indicates that NVIDIA nForce4 SLI based platforms are going to be very popular for another while and hence we should pay due attention to them. Today we are going to take a closer look at a feature-rich mainboard from Gigabyte based on this chipset.

Specification and Accessories

Gigabyte Company has always been knows for a offering the customers a great variety of diverse solutions based on the same core logic set. NVIDIA nForce4 SLI is also no exception for Gigabyte. At this point there are four mainboard models based on this chipset in the Gigabyte product range. We managed to get our hands on the most interesting solution of the four: Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI.

The mainboard looks very impressive due to a large number of onboard components, so it would be really hard to build an opinion about basing only on the PCB photo. So, let’s take a look at the specification.

Here I would like to stress that the other three Gigabyte mainboards based on NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset are based on the same PCB, but boast slightly different (reduced) features set compared with what we have on GA-K8NXP-SLI. Therefore, everything we will be saying in this review about the GA-K8NXP-SLI, is mostly true for the other similar products. In the less feature-rich modifications Gigabyte may remove the FireWire controller, the second Gigabit network controller and the additional Serial ATA RAID controller, but other than that all the mainboards in this product line from this manufacturer are very similar.

As for the accompanying accessories that come with the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard, it is pretty much as attractive as the mainboard’s features. All the accessories didn’t even fit into a standard size box. As a result, this mainboard is selling as a kit of two boxes wrapped into multi-color carton.

Inside this two-storied box you will find the following:

• A CD disk with a standard set of drivers and utilities;
• Eight red and orange Serial ATA cables;
• Eight power cables for Serial ATA HDDs;
• One 80-pin Parallel ATA cable and one FDD cable;
• SLI Bridge board for SLI mode;
• A bracket for the care rare panel with a special stopper for SLI Bridge fastening;
• I/O shield panel for the case rare side;
• A bracket with two IEEE1394 ports and two High Speed USB ports;
• Two brackets for the case rear panel with two High Speed USB ports;
• A daughter card of the six-channel CPU voltage converter;
• WiFi PCI card, 802.11g WLAN with a built-in antenna;
• A brief installation guide and detailed user’s manual.

Although this is a really nice set of accessories we have here, I don’t think you will be surprised with it. Not so long ago, when Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard belonged to the top-price range products, it sold for about $200. So, the users really paid the price for these two boxes full of goodies.

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.

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.

PCB Design

Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard pleased us with its features, but didn’t surprise us that much. To tell the truth, these features are pretty common for the solutions from the highest price group. Now let’s take a closer look at the PCB design of this mainboard, to see if there is anything truly remarkable about it.

The major peculiarity of the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI, just as that of many other Gigabyte mainboards, is the specific design of the CPU voltage regulator. As we have already mentioned, Gigabyte designs a lot of mainboards within the same product family on the same basic PCB layout. The primary difference between the mainboard models within the same family is the additional onboard controllers. However, Gigabyte marketing people believe this is not enough to stimulate the sales of their expensive solutions. Therefore, the company engineers designed a unique processor voltage regulator circuitry that allows increasing the number of channels in the power converter by simply adding a special daughter card.

Gigabyte mainboards based on NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset are equipped with a three-channel voltage converter. However, the more expensive solutions come with an additional K8DPS card that allows increasing the number of converter channels up to 6. When you install this card into a special slot right next to the processor socket, the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI voltage regulator turns into a 6-channel one from the 3-channel one.

This way Gigabyte marketing team can turn this peculiarity into a key attraction of Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI as well as other solutions that come with the voltage regulator like that.

The K8DPS card is also worth our attention, actually. The card does have three additional power converter channels laid out. Moreover, the MOSFETs are covered with an active cooling system that lights up blue when the fan is working. We have to stress that this cooler is not really needed there, so you can simply remove it completely: the components on the K8DPS card do not heat up that much at all. For example, the MOSFETs of the other three power channels located on the mainboard do just fine without even a heatsink.

One of the major arguments in favor of more voltage regulator channels is the increased life cycle of the components used. It is true that without the K8DPS card the MOSFETs of the CPU voltage regulator circuitry will heat up to 60^o C. By doubling the number of channels and hence the number of transistors, we can drop this temperature down to 50 degrees. But this is actually not as important as it might seem.

Of course, the 6-channel CPU voltage regulator is a very attractive feature, but most mainboards out there do just fine with a three-channel regulator and their owners don’t feel like they are missing something. So, it is important to understand that there is no real need for a 6-channel power converter. Especially since Gigabyte uses very high-quality electronic components from such big companies as SANYO, Rubycon and Nichicon.

Our practical tests of the 6-channel CPU voltage regulator (with a daughter card) against the 3-channel one (without the daughter card) showed that the mainboard performed identically in both cases. The more powerful CPU voltage regulator doesn’t even affect the processor’s overclocking potential. So, this K8DPS card will hardly contribute anything to the system performance, and all you will get is just impressive looks. Moreover, you should keep in mind that the installed K8DPS card may prevent you from using massive CPU cooling systems.

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.

BIOS and Overclocking

Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard was tested with the BIOS version F10, which was the latest BIOS version available at the time we were working on this article.

The BIOS of this mainboard is based on Award-Phoenix 6.00PG microcode. Gigabyte engineers, however, added a few things of their own to this code. First of all, I would like to mention the DualBIOS technology, which implies that there is a second Flash-memory chip on the board that contains the reserve BIOS code copy. If the major Flash chip content gets damaged by some viruses or as a result of some improper reflashing procedures, the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI owners can always restore it without contacting the technical support.

The utility intended for work with DualBIOS technology built into the mainboard BIOS is quite convenient and functional. It allows to manage the contents of both Flash-memory chips and to reflash the BIOS from a floppy disk if necessary.

The second innovation introduced by the BIOS developers is the transfer of some system settings into some “hidden” section, which can be accessed by pressing the Ctrl + F1 combination. One of the most important functions that also got into this hidden section is the Command Rate control. At first sight, it may seem no big deal, but you should keep in mind that by default the mainboard sets this parameter to 2T, that may result into a certain performance decrease. In other words, when you are setting the system parameters for the first time, you should make sure that you access the hidden section of the BIOS and set the Command Rate the right way.

However, as our practical tests showed, there was a good reason why Gigabyte engineers hid the Command Rate setting so far away. When this parameter is set to 1T, the mainboard loses its impeccable stability. In the nominal work mode it is not that noticeable, however, when you do overclocking with the Command Rate set to 1T, the mainboard starts running much less stable than the analogous solutions out there, so that we cannot reach the maximum memory subsystem performance.

The third peculiarity of the BIOS Setup of Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard is the Top Performance option in the main menu. If you set it to Enabled, the clock generator frequency will be increased by 5MHz over the nominal value. In other words, this is a hidden overclocking trick.

All these above listed peculiarities are typical of almost all Gigabyte mainboards. The company engineers always accompany them with some other technologies driving extra performance. Among those are: M.I.B.2 (Memory Intelligent Booster 2), C.I.A. 2(CPU Intelligent Accelerator 2) and R.G.B (Robust Graphics Booster). The latest BIOS versions of the mainboard we are reviewing today have only the R.G.B. technology, while all the others have been removed, just in case. And this was a very smart decision, I should say, because the hardware enthusiasts were not satisfied with the efficiency of these technologies anyway and still preferred manual system adjustment and overclocking. So, we can call the new BIOS for Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI much more overclocking-friendly now.

However, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the BIOS Setup structure of the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard. First of all, PC Health Status section needs a makeover, because it is not as informative as it actually should be. Although the mainboard can monitor a lot of parameters, the only things you can find here are fan rotation speeds and CPU temperature. All voltages are hidden behind the faceless “OK” values.

However, we would definitely want to give proper credit to the memory timings configuration page. Of course, Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI cannot boast the same flexibility here as the leading overclocking-friendly platforms, but the memory controller settings it offers are quite extensive anyway.

As for the CPU overclocking options, they are the following:

• The frequency of the clock generator forming the CPU frequency can be adjusted between 200 and 456MHz with 1MHz increment;
• The frequency of the PCI Express bus can be independently adjusted between 100 and 150MHz with 1MHz increment;
• The CPU frequency multiplier can be adjusted manually (reduced below the nominal value). The minimal value is 5x;
• The processor Vcore can be increased up to 1.75V with 0.05V increment;
• The memory voltage can be selected manually. DIMM slots can receive from 2.6V to 2.8V with 0.1V increment;
• The chipset voltage can be increased from the default 1.5V to 1.8V with 0.1V increment;
• The voltage on the HyperTransport bus can be adjusted between 1.2V and 1.5V with 0.1V increment;
• The parameters responsible for the working frequency and width of the HyperTransport bus can also be adjusted. The frequency of this bus is set with a multiplier (relative to the clock generator frequency), which can be set to 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, and 5x. The width of the bus can be set to 8 or 16 bits in any direction.

All in all, Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI boasts a pretty good set of overclocking friendly options. However, the supported ranges of some selected parameters arouse some questions. I am talking about the voltages in the first place. If the 1.75V maximum for processor Vcore is enough in most cases, then the maximum voltage for the DIMM slots is quite low: only 2.8V. To be honest, this value is simply ridiculous according to the today’s standards. There are a lot of high-speed DDR-SDRAM modules out there that require higher voltage even in the specification. What overclocking can we talk of in this case?

So, even though Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI has become very much like an overclocker product, there are quite a few things that spoil the impression and need to be taken care of before we rank it high.

But this is not the final verdict yet. Let’s check how this mainboard is going to behave during real overclocking experiments.

For our tests we assembled a system on Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard with an Athlon 64 3800+ processor on Venice core. First of all we decided to see how far up could the clock generator frequency go, before the mainboard would lose stability. For this test we reduced the clock frequency multiplier to 6x and dropped down the memory frequency, so that the board could be the only one to affect the overclocking results.

With the nominal HyperTransport multiplier of 5x we started experiencing problems at 240MHz frequency already. However, it is a known fact that nForce4 SLI based mainboards do not feel quite comfortable when the HuperTransport frequency exceeds 1000MHz. So, you have to reduce the corresponding multiplier to avoid this issue. This was exactly what we did: HyperTransport multiplier was reduced to 3x. After that we were pleasantly surprised, as our Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI remained stable until the clock generator frequency reached 350MHz. In other words, the mainboard copes perfectly well with the clock generator frequency increase.

Once we did this, we decided we should try overclocking our test CPU, which works at the nominal 2.4GHz. We increased the multiplier to 8x and Vcore to 1.5V. with these settings our Athlon 64 3800+ CPU worked stably at 2.7GHz clock frequency, which is a normal result. The clock generator frequency in this case equaled 337MHz.

However, we reduced the memory frequency when we overclocked the CPU. So, in conclusion to our overclocking session we decided to take a look at memory overclocking efficiency on Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI. We took a pair of Corsair CMX512-3200XL memory modules built of Samsung TCCD chips and checked the maximum frequency these modules could work at in this mainboard with their timings set to 3-4-4-10 and 1T Command Rate. For better results we raised the Vmem on the DIMM slots to 2.8V. The maximum memory frequency we managed to achieve in this experiment was 245MHz.

Unfortunately, this is not the result we had expected to see. So, even though Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI allows overclocking the CPUs quite efficiently, its work with the RAM leaves much to be desired. And it is not only the insufficient DIMM voltage that causes these problems. Other nForce4 based mainboards allow raising the memory frequency to 300MHz in the same testing conditions and even higher than that. What is the matter with Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI? I believe it is the DIMM slots layout that limits the supported frequency range and aggravates the mainboard stability.

Therefore, we have to rank this mainboard as a mainstream overclocker’s solution, even though it allowed raising the clock generator frequency quite high.

Moreover, I would like to add that Gigabyte engineers didn’t make the entire overclocking process very user friendly and comfortable. Unfortunately, the mainboard doesn’t allow resetting all the parameters to their default values in case of over-overclocking. So, you will have to get to the CMOS jumper, which is located in far not the easiest-to-reach place on the PCB.

Software Bundle

Gigabyte ha been paying special attention to the software bundled with their mainboards for a long time now. Their brand name EasyTune utility for controlling the hardware resources of the mainboard from Windows has already lived through its fifth reincarnation. So, Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI comes with EasyTune5.

This utility allows overclocking the CPU from Windows, offers hardware monitoring options and SmartFan controls.

Since Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI doesn’t support C.I.A. 2 and M.I.B. 2 technologies, the corresponding page in the EasyTune5 utility is inactive.

Of course, you can also use NVIDIA’s own tools, such as nTune, NVIDIA Firewall 2.0, nvRAID and nvMixer, besides EasyTune5.

In conclusion I would like to say that besides the above mentioned tools and utilities, the software bundle also contains some other programs. Namely there are BIOS reflashing tools, software for creation of your own logos displayed during POST, and special tools for hardware monitoring through local network.

Testbed and Methods

To make our review complete we tested the performance of the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI in our standard set of benchmarks. However, I have to point out that these tests hardly make that much sense. The memory controller of Socket 939 systems is integrated into the CPU, so the mainboard makers can hardly seriously affect the system performance. In fact, the only thing the memory makers can really do is slow down their product by setting the wrong memory timings in the BIOS. Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI didn’t have this issue, so I don’t think its performance is going to be very much different from that of most other NVIDIA nForce4 based products.

Nevertheless, we may still detect certain performance difference during overclocking. As we have already mentioned before, Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI is not very stable with Command Rate set to 1T. As a result we have to set this parameter to 2T in order to achieve the same clock rates as the other mainboards allow. So, our hero will be slightly slower during overclocking than some of its competitors.

To illustrate what I have just tried to explain we decided to compare the performance of Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI against that of another Socket 939 mainboard that has already become a reference point in our performance analysis of Socket 939 platforms. I am talking about DFI LanParty UT NF4-Ultra-D mainboard. For our tests we assembled the following testbeds:

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (Socket 939, 2.4GHz, 512KB L2, Venice);

• Mainboards:
• DFI LanParty UT NF4 Ultra-D (Socket 939, NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
• Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI (Socket 939, NVIDIA nForce4 SLI);
• Memory: Corsair Twinx CMX1024-3200XL (2x512 Мбайт, 2-2-2-10);
• Graphics card: PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (PCI-E x16).
• Storage subsystem: Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150).
• OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP2.

In the overclocked platforms the CPU frequency was increased to 2.7GHz. The clock generator frequency was set to 270MHz, and the clock multiplier – to 10x. The processor Vcore was set to 1.5V on both mainboards. As for the memory frequency, it was set to 192MHz, because lower memory latency is much more important for Athlon 64 systems than high memory bandwidth. Thus we assigned the most aggressive values to all memory timings. Nevertheless, even with these memory settings we couldn’t use Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI with Command Rate 1T.

In the nominal mode we ran all the tests with the Command Rate 1T.

Performance

Here come the obtained benchmark results:

As you can see, Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI works just fine in the nominal mode. However, we cannot say the same about overclocked mode. The Command Rate setting issue does have its negative effect on the results, as you may see.

Note that we decided not to run any additional tests aimed at figuring out the top combination of memory frequency and timings when Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI loses its stability with 1T Command Rate setting. It is evident, that this mainboard yields to its competitors anyway.

Conclusion

The launch of NVIDIA nForce4 SLI x16 chipset pushed the price of the solutions on the nForce4 SLI core logic down. As a result, many relatively expensive Socket 939 mainboards turn more affordable and can now be used in mainstream systems. Today we took a real close look at one such board - Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI.

This seems to be a very attractive product with rich set of features at first glance. It supports SLI technology, features two network controllers and allows connecting a lot of external devices via USB 2.0 and FireWire interfaces. Moreover, the mainboard comes with a very rich set of accessories, which even includes a WiFi controller. However, despite all these advantages that will please (with some allowances) unsophisticated computer users, overclockers will most likely be disappointed with this product. And the reasons for that are more than evident. Besides a few pretty frustrating trifles, such as poor hardware monitoring or limited voltage ranges for some components, the mainboard performance with 1T Command Rate leaves much to be desired. And it means that Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI farces the user to make a very complicated choice between high performance, high stability and good overclocking results. There are quite a few solutions out there that do not have these issues, so unfortunately we cannot give Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI a high grade.

So, these are the highs and lows of this product.

Highs:

• Excellent accessories set including a WiFi controller;
• Two PCI Express x8/x16 slots and SLI support;
• Great networking features: two Gigabit controllers, Active Armor and NVIDIA Firewall 2.0 support;
• 8 Serial ATA channels implemented via the mainboard chipset and an additional onboard Serial ATA RAID controller;
• IEEE1394 support;
• DPS technology (Dual Power System) and six-channel CPU voltage regulator;
• Cool’n’Quiet technology and SmartFan that allow intellectual management of the CPU fan rotation speed and CPU temperature monitoring.

Lows:

• Too narrow voltage range for the memory slots;
• Low stability with 1T Command Rate setting, especially during overclocking;
• Some design flaws;
• Too few expansion slots;
• Poor system monitoring offering only CPU temperature control;
• Noisy fan on the K8DPS daughter card;
• No options for monitoring and rotation speed adjustment for the chipset fan and K8DPS fan.