Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI (nVidia nForce4 SLI) MoBo Review
Overclocking and stability
Let's take a look at the power converter. It uses a 3-phase power scheme, in which there are five 3300 mkF, four 1800 mkF, and five 1000 mkF capacitors.
But if we activate the VRM_CONN slot and install the DPS module, then the power supply module operates following a 6-phase scheme.
By the way, on the DPS module there are two 3300 mF, one 1500 mF and three 1000 mkF capacitors. Besides, there is also an additional fan on which improves cooling of the power supply module.
Despite the theoretical advantage of using the DPS, we found no benefits in practice. In particular, the board runs absolutely stably without the DPS module, and no improvements in overclocking results were found after installing it. Besides, installation of the DPS module makes the assembly operator's job a bit complicated. For instance, in using Gigabyte 3D Cooler the DPS blocks the fastening clip of the cooler.
But with Zalman 7700, the DPS fails to be installed in its default form.
To make the DPS module fit into the slot, the 40 mm fan has to be removed. That can be done absolutely safely - the air flow from the 120 mm fan and the Zalman 7700 cooler is enough to blow the whole power supply module of the motherboard.
Now on to the overclocking features.
First, the Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI allows adjusting the system bus speed within 200 to 400 MHz in 1 MHz increments. You can't enter the required value directly, so you have to scroll through all the interim values.
Another item is the feature for changing the processor's multiplier.
Its adjustment range is within 4 to 11 (the maximum for the 3500+ model) in 1 increments. For each multiplier, there is a respective clock speed. But as the HTT (or FSB) speed goes up, the specified values are not recalculated, which may result in a confusion.
The next item deals with raising the processor voltage (Vcore) from 0.8V to 1.75V in 0.025-0.05V increments.
The next item deals with raising the memory voltage.
The Vmem voltage can be raised by +0.2V in 0.1V increments. Besides, the overclocker can increase voltage on the chipset by 0.3V in 0.1V increments,
and on the HT bus.
Finally, the user can adjust the PCI Express bus within 100 MHz to 150 MHz.
Now on to the practical overclocking. The board demonstrated good results: a stable running at ~300 MHz.
But despite the stable operation at such a high speed, the picture sometimes jittered in 3D benchmarks. You can overclock the board using the proprietary Gigabyte EasyTune 5 utility. But our attempts to overclock using nVidia nTune failed: even with the most recent version (v 2.00.23, already available to download from nVidia's official web site:) it hung deadly at the stage of startup.
Like in Asus A8N-SLI, this product by Gigabyte offers quite an interesting feature - "Robust Graphics Booster".
Once it is activated, the motherboard increases the frequencies of the core and the memory of the video card. But in practice we found no effect of enabling the feature (perhaps the situation will change in future versions of the BIOS). Besides, programmers at Gigabyte provided for a manual raise of frequencies of the core and video card memory. To that end, two features are used: "R.G.B. core clock %" and "R.G.B. memory clock %" (which become accessible upon pressing the Ctrl+F1):
The overclocking extent can be selected as percentages.
In trying to test these features we got unstable running in 3D applications (again, perhaps future versions will fix that).
The last interesting feature is "M.I.B. 2" which is meant for automatic optimization of memory settings:
it offers ready-made settings templates for specific modules:
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