Gigabyte 8N-SLI Royal (nVidia nForce4) SLI Intel Edition
Expansion options
With the emergence of nVidia onto the market of chipsets for Intel processors, support for SerialATA-II appeared for the first time. Four respective connectors are installed in the bottom left corner of the board, are colored orange and offer quite tricky plastic limiters.
Two more SerialATA channels are implemented with a PDC20779 chip made by Promise. That same controller supports one more ParallelATA channel whose connector is positioned near the south bridge and directed in parallel to the board's plane.
Remember that nForce4 offers support for 2 ParallelATA channels, which makes it possible to plug in as many as 12 hard disks to Gigabyte 8N-SLI: 6 over the SerialATA (four of which over the SerialATA II), and 4 over the ParallelATA.
Then, there are two Gigabit LAN controllers. The first one is the 88E1111 chip made by Marvell (connected to the PCI bus):
The second one is the 88E8053 chip (connected to the PCI Express x1 bus) made by the same company.
Thus, we get two RJ45 connectors on the rear panel of the board at a time.
Besides the two LAN controllers, 8N-SLI uses two controllers to support the Firewire bus.
These are TSB82AA2 and TSB81BA3 chips made by Texas Instruments. Therefore, the board offers support for three IEEE1394b ports. All the ports are additional - i.e., they require that brackets be plugged in. Besides the Firewire, the board supports 10 USB 2.0 ports, four of which on the rear panel, with 6 more plugged in with brackets.
And the last thing to dwell on is the integrated audio. ALC850 chip is used as the codec, which supports output for 8 channels.
The board's rear panel looks like this:
Instead of one of the COM ports, there is an optical and coaxial SP-DIF output. The missing COM port is even not provided by the PCB design.
Note that Gigabyte 8N-SLI uses no jumpers. To reset the BIOS settings, close the CLR_CMOS connector near the battery.
Now on to the BIOS settings.
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