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One of Gigabyte's most definite strengths is the quality and quantity of their bundled accessories - this time is no exception. The sheer amount of everything included is astounding.

First off, we have eight Serial ATA cables, four in orange and four in red. Along with the SATA cables, Gigabyte provides four SATA power adapters, with two SATA power plugs on each end. They figure that you might want to use up to eight hard drives, but don't have a SATA-ready power supply. The usual 80-conductor IDE cable and floppy cable is also provided.

Next up are the USB and Firewire back plates. I'm used to seeing one - Gigabyte has bundled three. Two of the back plates are USB-only and contain two USB 2.0 ports each. The last backplanes contains two USB 2.0 ports, one Firewire 800 port, and one Firewire 400 port.

What motherboard bundle would be complete without the manual, quick installation guides, and driver CD? Not this one. You can expect to find the usual collection of things, including a SATA RAID manual for the Sil3114 controller, in this bundle. The manual comes in at 83 English pages, and is very cleanly written and laid out, with intuitive, high-quality diagrams.

Lastly we have the SLI toys. You can expect to find the much-coveted SLI bridge, as well as Gigabyte's own interesting addition: a retention bracket for holding the SLI bridge in place. Some people have reported that their SLI bridge is uncomfortably loose, so this is a much-appreciated addition. The bridge is merely a metal bracket that you screw into the expansion slot cover between your SLI babies, with a metal arm and pad coming up and over the SLI bridge, keeping it snuggly pushed down.

The Board

Component-wise, nothing has changed from the K8NXP-SLI. Gigabyte has deviated from the norm by using all four SATA ports from the nForce MCP, as well as adding four additional ports from the Silicon Image Sil3114 controller. The Sil3114 is a fairly advanced solution, supporting RAID5, as well as the usual RAID0, RAID1, RAID10, and JBOD.

Dual Gigabit Ethernet is also a standard feature on this motherboard. Besides the onboard GbE offered by the nForce 4 chipset, Gigabyte has added an additional Marvell controller for a second GbE connection. This is definitely handy for anyone who wants to use their computer for some routing work, as well as possibly load-balancing the two GbE connections for even higher performance.

DIMM slots need not be a worry, with a total of four present on the board. Each slot supports a maximum of 1 GB, for up to a total of 4 GB, which really makes the point of 64-bit memory access moot. Obviously >4 GB of RAM is not an issue on desktop boards yet.

As with all recent Gigabyte boards, the K8N Ultra-SLI comes with a Dual BIOS feature in the event that one of the BIOSes is FUBARed, perhaps because your bratty little brother or sister has learned how to use flash utilities or some such silly reason.

In terms of board layout, the Gigabyte K8N Ultra SLI is a winner. We'll get the obligatory DIMM slot discussion out of the way by saying that there is ample space between the first PCI-Express x16 slot and the DIMM slots, about 1.5" to be exact. All the nForce 3 boards we looked had a downright stupid placement for the MCP SATA ports (right below the CPU socket). You won't find that on this nForce 4 board: All 8 of the SATA ports are near the bottom of the board, with four being aligned with the bottom edge, and the other four being aligned with the right edge. The remaining USB/Firewire connectors are all located at the bottom edge of the board, which is ideal, as you don't want them blocking off any expansion slots.

A Gigabyte motherboard would not be a Gigabyte motherboard without the vibrant colour scheme and the Gigabyte Blue PCB. They might as well trademark the colour. While the colours are definitely attractive, they're also a huge convenience for anyone giving a shot at putting together their computer for the first time. Everything has been colourized and explained, even the front panel pin headers. I had no trouble at all figuring out what LED and switch went where. This is also a plus in my books, as I absolutely hate having to break out of the zone to dig through the manual. It kills my geek ego. ;-)

The nForce 4 chip is passively cooled by a wide heatsink, which is atypical of nForce 4 motherboards. Even the K8NXP-SLI had an active cooling solution. While I welcome this change (less fans is always less noise), it may have adverse effects on stability, or at the very least, overclocking ability.

There is a good deal of room separating the prized PCIe x16 slots. With a PCIe x1 slot stuck in between them, you'll lose out on the ability to use that slot if you have a dual-slot video card in the first PCIe x16 slot. With a single-slot video card, you should still be able to use a PCIe x1 card in the little slot, though things may get a little tight. As is the going standard across all other PCIe motherboards, two regular PCI/33 MHz slots are provided, located at the very bottom of the board.

The one and only gripe I have with the layout of this motherboard is one that will probably follow me for many years to come: the placement of the +12V ATX connector. While the ATX/BTX connector is located in an unobtrusive location (at least in my opinion), the +12V ATX connector is located all the way at the other extreme of the board, directly behind the PS/2 ports. I don't know about anyone else, but I hate this.

In general, Gigabyte definitely has a winner here. Other than that +12V ATX connector complaint I have, this board has a very user-friendly and neat layout.