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The K8NXP-SLI comes with an unbelievable amount of cabling and extra connectors through PCI expansion slots. A total of eight SATA cables are included for those crazy enough to run eight drives off a single system. Four molex to SATA power connectors are also included, the molex splits into two power connectors so Gigabyte does actually give the end user the ability to power all of eight SATA drives. Wrapping things up on the drive connectivity front is a single IDE cable along with a floppy cable.

Three PCI brackets are included - two have two USB slots while the third has two USB slots in addition to a 6 pin and 4 pin Firewire connector. I suppose some of this is somewhat redundant as I imagine that most people who will end up buying this board will have some sort of front USB on their case but its good to see Gigabyte being thorough about it and not cheap out on smaller items.

Gigabyte's Dual Power System card makes an appearance here also. This one is actively cooled unlike a passive one that we received with their 925x board.

The third ethernet connector is not onboard but is a PCI GN-WPKG 802.11 b/g wireless card.

The usual assortment of drivers are spread over several CDs and floppies. As we mentioned before, our particular board came as a package with the 3D1, a single slot 6600GT SLI. In addition to the motherboard components, also included was a video out dongle, graphics board drivers as well as full copies of Joint Operations and Thief 3.

The Board

There are some interesting choices that Gigabyte has made for the K8NXP-SLI as far as component choices go. We had seen quite a few boards in the nForce 3 generation that went with 2 SATA ports from the MCP and then add a drive controller to add support for 2-4 additional ones. Gigabyte has decided to go all the way with their SLI board and has used all four SATA ports from the MCP as well as four additional ones from a Silicon Image Sil3114 controller. In addition to the usual RAID0, RAID1, RAID10, and JBOD, the Sil3114 also supports RAID5. RAID5 is a striped solution like RAID0 but requires a third disk for parity which offers similar protection as RAID1 so in essence we get something that is similar to RAID10 but without the overhead of a fourth disk.

Besides the onboard GbE offered by the nForce 4 chipset, Gigabyte has added an additional Marvell controller for a second GbE connection. Four DIMM slots are also available whereas most nForce 3 board designs seemed content with three. The K8NXP-SLI only supports up to 4GB of memory so the promise of 64-bit memory access and breaking the 4GB limit is still not a huge factor for desktop boards.

As with all most Gigabyte boards, the GA-K8NXP-SLI comes with a Dual BIOS feature in the event that one of the BIOSes gets hosed during a flash or some other equally disastrous event.

Audio connectors make up a good portion of the back panel

The Layout

A vibrant color scheme is as much a trademark of Gigabyte's as is their blue PCB. The wide swath of colors is also functional especially for those trying their hand at putting together their computer for the first time. Nice touches include the obsessive labeling of every single connector on the motherboard although this does get convoluted especially at the bottom of the board. The colored front panel pin outs are also very useful and allows the end user to avoid flipping through the manual.

The board layout is generally very good. There is ample space around the DIMM slots so even with the video card in there is a good amount of space to work the memory with. The ridiculous position of the SATA ports found right below the processor and above the AGP slot on all the nForce 3 boards we looked at is no longer an issue for the K8NXP-SLI - the SATA ports provided by the MCP are at the right side of the motherboard while the SI ones are near the bottom. All the connectors for the Firewire and extra USB ports are located at the bottom of the board which is a pretty ideal position for those as the PCI brackets should not be blocking out actual expansion slots.

The MCP is actively cooled something that I am a bit wary of as my experience with a lot of motherboard fans is that they tend to die prematurely. To make matters worse, they generally make a huge racket during death throes that last for weeks. I'd encourage motherboard manufacturers to go with higher quality passive heatsinks instead though that may be difficult in this case as the height the heatsink/fan unit would interfere with the PCIe slot if it is too tall.

There seems to be enough room separating the x16 PCIe slots as I could put a X850 XT PE in slot 1 and still get a second card in the other slot but it was getting tight. I'm not sure how other manufacturers are handling this but if a 6800 Ultra manufacturer took a little too much liberty with the heatsink/fan design, this could present a problem. Using SLI would eliminate access to one of the two x1 PCIe slots. Two legacy PCI slots remain which seems to be the going standard across the other PCIe boards that we have taken a look at.

Now for some gripes. I do not like how the 12V connector and the ATX connector are on opposite sides of the board. Both are near the top and near the edge of the board so cabling can still be run fairly cleanly, but in an ideal situation they would be next to each other so they can be zapstrapped together and tucked away somewhere. The DPS slot sits right above the processor. I do not think this is an ideal position as it blocks a lot of the airflow from the powersupply that would otherwise be drawing air out of the CPU cavity.

All in all, though, Gigabyte has a pretty good layout going for them on the K8NXP-SLI and there are no real egregious issues with the layout of the board.