Conclusion: Waiting For NVIDIA Now

Once more, Gigabyte has managed to surprise us. Although the news about this motherboard has been out since late May, and we couldn't be sure whether quad GPU SLI would work or not, this is by far the most interesting Pentium 4 desktop motherboard we have seen. We hope that it will be available soon, even if it is only for a small number of enthusiasts, or certain user groups such as dealers.

In this board, Gigabyte's pioneering engineering group decided to link two components that were never designed to work together. Well, the 8N SLI Quad Royal works perfectly, running two NVIDIA chipsets at the same time. Thanks to this, the motherboard features 32 PCI Express lanes that can be assigned flexibly to four x16 PCIe slots. The user gets to choose whether to use them for graphics cards, as we did when testing this chameleonic motherboard, or to install other PCIe adapters, whether they are x1 PCIe devices or higher-bandwidth devices such as storage controllers.

A total of ten displays can be attached via the appropriate hardware, which currently means Gigabyte's 3D1 graphics card family - be sure you get revision 2.0. Using regular PCI Express graphics cards, all you need are models based on either ATI or NVIDIA chips; both work for multiple display setups.

What is missing, of course, is SLI support. What would NVIDIA lose if it were to agree to Gigabyte's solution and release drivers that support SLI across four GPUs? Well, I guess there is not much to lose by being "first to market" here, especially since only very few people have the tremendous budget needed to go for a super expensive motherboard - we expect a minimum price of around £150 - and as many as two dual GPU graphics cards at almost £700 each. We certainly do expect the efficiency of a quad GPU setup to be behind what current dual GPU SLI configurations scale. But would anybody willing to go the hardcore way really care?