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Introduction

When everyone was announcing their Athlon 64 PCI Express boards back in the fall, I do not think that many people expected that nForce 4 SLI based boards would be the first to hit the market. Though VIA, SiS and ATI have all announced solutions also, it does not seem that anyone else has boards on the market in any kind of quantity at this point beyond NVIDIA. This does make sense to a degree though - people needed a compelling reason to switch to PCI Express and SLI is one of the better reasons to do so.

With such a diverse product lineup, it is easy to forget sometimes that Gigabyte's primary source of bread and butter is in fact, their motherboards. The last few months has seen Gigabyte attempt to have a more diverse reputation than simply steady and sure and nothing exemplifies this more than their Sigma series lineup which comes with practically everything under the sun. Today we take a look at the second half of a decidedly enthusiast offering in their nForce 4 SLI offering, the GA-K8NXP-SLI which we received as a bundle package from Gigabyte alongside their single slot 6600GT SLI board in the 3D1.

Some of the more significant improvements between the nForce 3 250Gb and the nForce 4 is of course, the switch from AGP to PCIe but some other significant improvements include the spruced up firewall on the networking side of things, improved SATA capabilities with 3Gb/s support and NCQ. There are three models of the nForce 4, the SLI, Ultra and the plain jane. The SLI and the Ultra are feature equivalent with the exception of the second x16 sized graphics slot. We've taken a closer look at the nForce 4 chipset late last year and some of the more technical details can be found there.

Specifications

Specifications are snagged gratuitiously off of Gigabyte's website. As we mentioned previously, they have pretty much every single angle covered. Dual Gigabit Ethernet, Dual BIOSes, Dual PCIe x16 slots, Dual Power System is a mouthful to process. Some other notable features, fast Firewire with the 1394b controller, an included wireless ethernet card, the SI SATA controller and the coaxial SPDIF In/Out connector. As far as connectivity goes, the only thing that is missing is an optical in/out connector. It is impressive to see that Gigabyte would include features like 1394b with the few devices that currently support it (as far as I am aware of anyway).