Gigabyte 8N-SLI Royal (nVidia nForce4) SLI Intel Edition
Performance
Interestingly, Gigabyte 8N-SLI is quite precise at setting the nominal FSB speed:
As a contender to our board in question we used Asus P5AD2-E Premium (Intel 925XE).
In our test setup, we used the following hardware:
| Test configuration |
| Processor |
Intel Pentium4 660 (Prescott 2M) (clock speed 3.6 GHz, 200õ18 ).
|
| Cooler |
Zalman 7700Cu |
| Video card |
Abit Radeon X600XT |
| Sound card |
Creative Live 5.1 |
| HDD |
IBM DTLA 307030 30Gb |
| Memory |
2x256 MB DDR2-533 made by Kingmax
|
| Case |
Inwin506 with PowerMan 300W power supply unit |
| OS |
Windows XP SP1 |
Let's first take a look at the results of synthetic benchmarks.
Now on to the gaming benchmarks (i.e. real-world applications).
Remarkably, in FarCry the nForce4 IE board demonstrated a substantial superiority (which is still hard to explain).
 Kb/s. the more the betterNote separately that the Asus board built on the i925XE chipset overstated the FSB speed by 2 MHz, which gives additional superiority of nForce4 IE over i925XE at the chipset speed.
Final Words
Let's first draw conclusions regarding the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset. No doubt, this product will add much of "fresh new blood" onto the market of Intel Pentium4 processors and will make this platform more popular. The main "pro" arguments in support of this statement are: very high performance (as high as that for i925XE-based motherboards), excellent expansion capabilities which surpass the features of ICH6, as well as support for the SLI technology. Of special mention is that the operating performance in running two video cards in the SLI mode makes almost no difference from that in nF4 SLI for the AMD platform (in percentage).
The new chipset is not free of shortcomings either. In particular, there are problems with overheating the north bridge, which is a negative point in terms of stability of the current stepping in nF4 IE.
Finally, questions on the prices for this chipset are rising, as well as regarding nVidia's plans for producing the "lite" versions of the chipset and versions with the video core integrated. But the most important conclusion is this - by its appeal, boards on the base of the nForce4 IE look much better than all the remaining boards for Intel processors (and this situation will not change until the release of i955X and i945P chipsets).
Secondly, here are the findings on the Gigabyte 8N-SLI. Of note is that the company engineers produced a really good product of great capabilities. In particular, using additional controllers they were able to expand the already rich capabilities of the nForce4 IE chipset. The list of overclocking features is quite impressive, and even the preliminary version of the board (its number is 0.2) shows pretty decent results (FSB>300 MHz). Anyway, there are some rough edges both in the implementation of the BIOS features and in the system functioning in general (which will most likely be fixed in new BIOS versions).
So far, the retail price is not defined yet. But the balance of these two parameters will be on par with other motherboard manufacturers.
Conclusion
Pros:
- Excellent stability and performance;
- Support for the SLI (two PCI Express x8x16 slots);
- Support for SerialATA (4 channels of SATA II; 2 SATA II channels - additional Promise controller; RAID);
- Support for ParallelATA (2 nForce4 channels, 1 channel - additional Promise controller);
- Integrated 8-channel audio and two Gigabit LAN controllers;
- Support for the USB2.0 (10 ports) and IEEE-1394b (3 ports);
- A pack of Gigabyte proprietary technologies: (DualBIOS, Smart FAN, @BIOS, FaceWizard);
- Rich package bundle (including a WiFi module).
Cons:
- Compulsory cooling of the board's north bridge
The board's specific features:
- Powerful overclocking features and quite decent results.
- DPS (Dual Power System) technology
Join the conference with all your questions, remarks and suggestions.
 |
Top Stories: |
 |
 |
|
MoBo:
| |
|
|
VGA Card:
|
|
|
|
CPU & Memory:
|
|
