There's an old saying, and it goes "Two heads are better than one", and it is an idea that is really catching on in the PC world.
This is our third Intel based SLI capable motherboard review; it almost feels like the whole world is rushing to embrace the "two must be better than one" point of view. It is all driven by the never-slacking thirst for more performance. Serious gamers feel the need - the need for speed - and are willing to shell out big bucks for more frames per second. All the manufacturers love this, as the PC market has been commoditized, and there are usually only razor thin margins on the most common parts, whereas gamer/tweaker parts carry a high premium - just look at the prices of Intel's "Extreme Edition" and AMD's "FX series" of processors - both are clearly aimed at gamers, and both have a very healthy price tag attached to them.
Today, we are taking a look at Gigabyte's GA-8N-SLI Royal, a high performance overclocker's board based on the Nvidia Nforce 4 SLI for Intel chipset (See "NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI for Intel" for more background information on this platform).
The 8N-SLI Royal has all the features we've come to expect from high end nForce boards; lots of I/O, decent audio, good memory bandwidth and an easy to tweak BIOS - however I must admit that I did not expect it to be as overclockable as it turned out to be. The 1066Mhz front side bus is a feature that we are going to come to expect from all future boards. I liked the clean layout, and the color coding is actually useful.
As you might expect from the 'Royal' label, Gigabyte has high hopes for this board, and as you will see from some of our test results, those hopes may well be justified. From features to IO to overclocking stability this board managed to work its way into our hearts. But first, let's take a look at some of the features and specs.
Specifications
Straight from Gigabyte's web site:
|
CPU |
LGA775 Intel® Pentium® D / Pentium® 4 processor with 1066/800/533MHz FSB |
|
Chipset |
Northbridge: NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel® Edition
Southbridge: NVIDIA MCP04 |
|
Memory |
Type: Dual channel DDR2 533/ 667 -240pin
Max capacity: Up to 4GB by 4 DIMM slots |
|
Expansion Slots |
Two PCIe x16 slot, supports two PCI-Express interface
Graphics cards with SLI mode
Two PCIe x1 slots
Two PCI slots (PCI 2.3 compliant)
one DPS slot |
|
RAID |
Southbridge + Promise PDC20779 storage controller |
|
Audio |
Realtek ALC850 AC'97 Audio Codec with 7.1 sound support |
|
IEEE 1394 |
T.I. IEEE1394b controller |
|
Gigabit Lan |
Marvell 88E8053 Gigabit Ethernet controller
Marvell 88E8111 Gigabit LAN PHY chip |
|
Gigabyte Specific |
U-Plus D.P.S. (Universal-Plus Dual Power System)
Bluetooth function
XpressTM Installation
XpressTM Recovery
C.I.A. 2 (CPU Intelligent Accelerator 2)
M.I.B. 2 (Memory Intelligent Booster 2)
EasyTune™ 5
M.I.T. (Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker)
S.O.S. (System Overclock Saver)
Download Center |
|
Bundled Software |
Support NVIDIA Firewall
Norton Internet Security |
|
Internal I/O connectors |
6 x Serial ATA connector (Bandwidth 3.0Gb/s)
3 x UDMA ATA 133/100/66 Bus Master IDE connectors
1 x FDD connector
3 x USB 2.0/1.1 connectors (supports 6 ports)
2 x IEEE 1394b connectors (supports 3 ports)
3 x cooling fan pin headers
1 x S/P-DIF input pin header
CD in |
|
Back Panel I/O |
4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
2 x RJ45 ports
Audio (4 x Line-out/ 1 x Line-in/ 1 x MIC) connector
Coaxial S/PDIF output
Optical fiber S/PDIF output
PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse
1 x COM port
1 x LPT |
|
Hardware Monitoring |
health status auto-detect and report by BIOS
Hardware detecting and reporting for case open, CPU voltage, and fan speed |
|
BIOS |
X 4M bit flash ROM, Award BIOS |
|
Form Factor |
ATX form factor (30.5 x 24.4 cm) |
Look at the number of USB, IEEE, SATA connectors, and much more available on the board. That is a SERIOUS amount of I/O capability!
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