New SLI motherboard from Gygabyte

Added: 03/29/2006

If you are searching for a good SLI motherboard, then you should pay your attention to the Gigabyte GA-8N SLI Quad Royal model. This is a good product, which demonstrates a rich functionality and allows to connect all possible external devices. South bridge of the motherboard is implemented with the chipset nVidia nForce4 SLI. That is the reason why this implementation inherits all the properties of the original technology.

The latest models of the SLI motherboard from the company Gigabyte is GA-8N SLI Quad Royal. This is a High-End SLI motherboard for the processors Intel Socket 775: Pentium 4, Pentium D or Pentium Extreme Edition.

Here are the technical characteristics of the motherboard:

the CPU socket Intel Pentium 4 LGA775 CPU;
the north bridge - nVidia nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition (Crush 19) , the south bridge - nVidia nForce4 SLI (Athlon Edition CK804).
four DDR2 DIMM memory slots;
extension slots:
4x PCI Express x16;
2x PCE Express x1;
1x 32 bit PCI;
the controller UltraATA/133 (two ports, four devices), FDD port;
four SATA2 interfaces with the support for RAID arrays via the nVidia nForce4 SLI;
ten ports USB 2.0;
three ports IEEE 1394a;
LAN - CK8-04 MAC + Marvell 88E1111 Gigabit PHY or Agere ET1310 PCIE Gigabit PHY ;
the Realtek ALC850 CODEC, eight channels with SPDIF inputs and outputs;
one COM port, one LPT port;
two PS/2 ports for the mouse and the keyboard.

The motherboard is based on the chipset nVidia nForce4 SLI Intel Edition. Many people believe that the interesting feature of this motherboard is that it has the chipset nForce4 SLI as a replacement for the old south bridge Media Communications Processor. It is possible, since the nForce4 SLI for Athlon 64 is a solution, which combines all required interfaces for the storages, network, USB, etc. After linking the chips via the HyperTransport channel, Gigabyte received an access to all functions of the chipset nForce4 for AMD. In fact, the company managed to implement four slots X8 PCI Express or two X16 slots.

The motherboard Gigabyte GA-8N SLI Quad Royal is combining two graphics cards due to the usage of four physical slots X16 PCI Express. This is a full size motherboard ATX with four fase voltage stabilizer, four sockets for the coolers and also four slots DDR2 DIMM, which allow the installation up to 4GB RAM. The motherboard also gas functions and interfaces, which are usual for the top motherboards.

There are two ports for the Gigabit Ethernet at the motherboard. The first port is provided by the chipset, and it supports the hardware firewall ActiveArmor. The second port is in the responsibility of the controller Marvell 88E1111. The motherboard is supplied with four SATA 2 ports that support the speed of the data transfer up to 300 MN per second with the Native Command Queuing. Moreover, there are two ports UltraATA/133, which you can use to connect optical drives or old hard disks.

The SLI motherboard from Gigabyte has a FireWire controller by Texas Instruments, which provides two ports. You can activate up to ten USB 2.0 ports at this motherboard. Four ports are integrated at the back panel and six ports are connected via the frontal ports. Gigabyte installed the chip Port 80 for debugging. The motherboard supports the enterprise technology DualBIOS that in its turn supports the work of the PC even if the main BIOS failed.

Gigabyte presents a good and efficient implementation of the SLI motherboard. Due to the usage of the original nVidia technologies, this motherboard successfully performs all its functions and provides many abilities for connecting external devices.

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