Review: Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI

Overclocking and Thoughts

As far as pushing the CPU frequency went, 260MHz seemed to be the highest stable clock achievable, which was not bad at all, although a little way off what has been seen on some nForce3 boards. At this frequency however we were somewhat limited by the abilities of our CPU, and so for our highest overall overclock, we went with a CPU frequency of 250MHz. This was complemented by a reduction of the HTT multiplier to 4x, dropping memory frequency to 166MHz and increasing the chipset voltage by 0.1V.

At these new settings, a default 3DMark 2001 run gave us a score of 24,160, an increase of around 600 points. RealStorm also showed a gain, moving up over two frames per second to a score of 68.15 at our new settings. With a more forgiving CPU and more tweaking to the system, the potential was there to produce even better results.

Thoughts

Buying an SLI capable nForce4 motherboard, you know you are paying a premium for the cutting edge technology it represents, and thus expect a lot for your money. The GA-K8NXP-SLI delivers that feeling of value for money, no doubt about it. As I said earlier, you'd be hard pressed to find a more complete set of features on a motherboard, from the eight Serial ATA ports through to dual Gigabit Ethernet connectors and an additional wireless LAN adapter. It's a promising package, even before you throw SLI into the mix.

The GA-K8NXP-SLI oozes of being an enthusiast's motherboard, and it shows throughout, from the thoughtful packaging which doubles as a test bed for the board through to the comprehensive set of overclocking features available in the BIOS. Performance is also generally on a par with other nForce4 boards we've seen, and the whole system was rock-solid stable throughout. The appearance of Gigabyte initiatives such as DPS and Dual BIOS add to that feeling of powerful stability, even in a worst case scenario such as a BIOS failure or power surge.

All in all, the GA-K8NXP-SLI proves all but impossible to fault. The biggest issue Gigabyte may face is the proliferation of cheaper, non-NVIDIA certified SLI solutions on the horizon, which may cut into the market for boards such as these. But even then, this particular offering could stand on its own two feet on feature-set alone.

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Cons

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