Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI

Board-Revision: 1.0

BIOS-Version: F7 (April 29, 2005)

The K8NXP-SLI attempts to outdo its competitors with a flurry of features. This board offers an IEEE-1394b (800 Mbit/s) Firewire chip, an additional SATA II RAID controller (Sil3114), and dual Gigabit LAN. It also features a power converter with a total of eight phases, implemented by the Gigabyte DPS module that has been in use for a few years now; the current version, however, gets by without active ventilators. The SATA sockets of the nForce connections already conform to SATA II, but not the four ports of the Silicon Image chips yet. All connections on the board can be easily distinguished according to color - Gigabyte even thought about the pin panel.

However, the high number of additional components takes a heavy toll. The DPS module reduces the free space around the CPU socket; also, only two PCI slots are available. However, Gigabyte did find the necessary space for a second Flash ROM chip (DualBIOS).