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Overclocking

It seems that with every Socket 939 board that we test, overclocking capabilities only get better. Our last Gigabyte board, the K8NXP-SLI, topped out at the high 270's on the HT bus. On our K8N Ultra-SLI sample, I've managed to crank things up to 295 MHz. While I've been somewhat spoiled by the DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra's 365 MHz, I remind myself that going from 200 MHz to ~300 MHz is a ~50% jump. A few years ago, hardcore overclockers would have killed for such percentages.

The other settings I used were a 6:5 memory divider (166 MHz) resulting in a speed of 246 MHz on our OCZ PC4200 EL Dual-Channel Platinum Edition, HT multiplier of 3x, and CPU multiplier of 8x. The HTT bus ran at 885 MHz and our Week 50 UPGW Athlon 64 3000+ Winchester ran at 2360 MHz. Based on previous testing, the RAM still had about 17 MHz of headroom and the Athlon 64 around 200 MHz.

I have a feeling that the K8N Ultra-SLI's passive heatsink is holding back its overclocking abilities. The first Prime95 run at 300 MHz took about 4 minutes to error out, while 298 MHz generated errors in about 2 minutes. This is (at least partially) indicative of heat possibly being a factor. If you were to slap on a small fan on the heatsink (which runs extremely hot), you would probably be able to break 300 MHz.

Conclusion

Gigabyte has a pretty good product on their hands with the K8N Ultra-SLI, although I wouldn't go so far as to call it spectacular. You won't beat any records if that is your goal with this motherboard, but otherwise you'll enjoy a snappy and stable computing experience. To be fair, in an age of everyone-and-their-mother releasing nForce 4 motherboards it's hard to stand out unless there is some drool-inducing whiz-bang feature that you just have to have.

The K8N Ultra-SLI is a very nice board as far as most motherboards go. While it was not a top-notch performer in all cases like the DFI LanParty NF4 SLI, it is still a quality board and for most real world tests, where the bounds are not simply the limitations of the mainboard, the performance differences should shrink. We did mention that we encountered stability issues at the beginning of our testing rounds, which were attributed to poor cooling of the nForce 4 chip. A good cleaning and application of Arctic Silver 3 fixed everything. We can't say for sure whether this is an issue that afflicts all boards or just our board, but we would like to see Gigabyte do some additional QA in the future to make sure that this doesn't happen. The passive heatsink can get quite toasty indeed while the board is under load - I'd estimate around 65 to 70 degrees Celsius based on the speed with which the heatsink induces pain on my fingers.

The Gigabyte K8N Ultra-SLI has two very important things going for it. The first is its SLI capability. You might think "Well duh, it's an SLI board". But then the second thing comes into play: the price. Priced at around $160 US, this top-notch nForce 4 SLI board is an absolute steal, especially when you consider that enthusiast boards like the DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR go for well over the $200 mark. If you're in the market for an nForce 4 PCI-Express motherboard but have doubts about the additional cost of SLI, the Gigabyte K8N Ultra-SLI ought to be near the top of your list as it can compete with Ultra based boards on pricing.

All in all, Gigabyte has a solid product that is positioned in the lucrative low-cost performance-oriented segment of the market. Soltek's K890Pro-939 was a top-notch PCI-Express performer at a very low price point, but the draw to the Gigabyte K8N Ultra-SLI here is the fact that it is an nForce 4-based board with true SLI capabilities.

Keep this motherboard on your lists. It's worth a definite look.