Related Articles

Conclusions

The K8NSNXP is a bit of a mixed bag. First off, it is a little green behind the ears - Windows installation problems and spotty performance are a couple areas of concern. Hopefully as the BIOS matures, both of these issues will be sorted out. The second sticking point is that Gigabyte has stuck with the vanilla NForce 3 250 chipset instead of opting for the Gb version. In our eyes, the hardware firewall is a pretty significant development and is a feature that all 250Gb motherboard producing companies should be pushing a bit. Gamers are exposed to a lot more on the internet than just email viruses and porn sites - Instant Messaging, IRC and games themselves leave footprints all over the internet and without some sort of protection there is a risk that some angry script kiddie will try to hose your system the next time you give em a good headshot. The CPU utilization and throughput of the 250Gb GbE is also much improved over the default add-in chip solutions.

Like with the original K8NNXP, Gigabyte includes a lot of extras including 1394b where as a good number of boards do not even include plane jane 1394a. The design of the K8NSNXP is getting a bit long in the tooth though as competitors have been able to acheive a higher level on integration on their boards - on both the MSI K8N Neo and the EpoX 8HDA5+ we see the a full set of audio connectivity options on the rear of the I/O panel instead of an extra PCI bracket with the Gigabyte. The dual LAN option is a nice feature to have for those who do not have a router.

That said the performance difference between the 150/250/250Gb is not night and day. In fact, the K8NNXP puts up quite a show over in most of the benchmarks being just as fast as both the 250 and Gb solutions if not faster at times. Both the 250 and 250Gb has NVRaid features which allow RAID partitions to span across both IDE and Nvidia SATA channels.

For those that currently own NForce 3 150 or VIA K8T800 boards there is no huge compelling reason to upgrade to another 754 based board. A better choice may be to wait for the Socket 939 variants of the board for a more secure upgrade path in the future. Hopefully Gigabyte can twaek the BIOS and kick up the performance of the K8NSNXP a notch before the boards it hits retail.

Questions, comments, concerns? Hit up the forum !