This board also compares favorably to earlier versions, because Gigabyte has completely done away with noisy cooling fans in its designs. Thus you'll find the Northbridge chipset equipped for silent operation: the nForce4 IE is cooled with a heat pipe. For ordinary operation this should suffice, but those inclined to overclock or to cram systems full of expansion cards should probably go ahead and clip the fan to the Northbridge heatsink, which Gigabyte includes in the motherboard's retail package.

The board includes a treasure trove of added functions, such as DualBIOS, a second EEPROM that stores a BIOS backup to permit fast, easy recovery from problems with the primary copy; it is useful after excessive tweaking or installing a bad update. The GA-8N-SLI Royal also features Firewire 1394a and 1394b (400 to 800 megabits per second), six SATA-II ports, three UltraATA/133 channels (two for optical drives), six additional USB 2.0 connectors, digital outputs for the HD sound system (optical and coax) and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Buyers of this motherboard will also find a USB Bluetooth dongle, and a set of extra goodies in the retail package that has to be seen to be believed.

By default, the GA-8N-SLI Royal starts up with overclocking set to 0.5%, which you can restore to normal operation only by disabling all performance boosting options in the BIOS (as we did for our benchmark testing). Gigabyte also outdoes itself with the wide variety of options that its BIOS offers, which also manages to make overclocking seem both easy and comfortable. At the same time, this facility isn't just for show; depending on what CPU you install, running the system clock at 300 MHz is no problem on this motherboard.