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Gigabyte

Gigabyte should be a familiar name to many of you. As one of the leading motherboard manufacturers in the world, their motherboards are highly regarded and popular with enthusiasts and OEMs alike. So when AMD released the Athlon 64 last September, Gigabyte was at the forefront of it all, announcing support for both the Socket 754 (Athlon 64) and the Socket 940 (Athlon FX). The motherboard we have on hand today is the Gigabyte K8 Triton Series GA-K8NNXP, which is based on nVidia's 3^rd generation chipset, the nForce3 150.

You may wonder why it took so long for us to come out with this review. Funny story really - we received this motherboard way back during the Athlon 64 launch period, but the Athlon 64 dogsled team did not make it all the way into our chilly part of Canada eh. So, we had a motherboard but no CPU to test it on. Whoever said that the motherboard was the most important part of the computer obviously never experienced our problem before. Of course, by the time we we were informed that the sled team got turned back due to record breaking cold weather, we were told to wait for the Athlon 64 3400+. Lacking a better alternative, we thought about purchasing an Athlon 64 3200+. However, since we never got around to buying the chip, we finally have two reviews for you - the Athlon 64 3400+ (which did arrive in one piece) and the Gigabyte K8NNXP.

nVidia

nVidia, more famous for its line of graphics cards and its hugely successful nForce2 motherboard chipset, was an early supporter of AMD's Hammer family. The nForce3 150 is nVidia's first stab at the K8 market (to be replaced by the nForce3 250 sometime in the future). The nForce2 Ultra 400 was hugely popular due to its high-performing dual-channel memory system and highly tweakable BIOS settings. The original iteration of the nForce was not as well received because it was a bit slower than the competing VIA solutions at the time and all the hype behind the original chipset did not translate into performance gains implied by nVidia. That was compounded by the fact that the nForce1 entered the market a bit late. Fortunately, the nForce3 got into the market right away and hopefully the nForce3 150 meets the same standards set by the nForce2.