Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Quad - Intel & AMD nForce4 SLI!

Tom’s Hardware Guide has the scoop on Gigabyte’s creative pairing of AMD and Intel nForce4 SLI chips - on the same motherboard. The Gigabyte "GA-8N-SLI Quad" offers Intel users (with deep pockets) the opportunity to use two dual-GPU or four single-GPU graphics cards:

The board, currently named "GA-8N-SLI Quad", shows four PCI Express slots that can be occupied by SLI-compatible graphics cards. According to sources, Gigabyte found a way to combine two nForce4 SLI chipsets on one platform. Interestingly, the board integrates two different versions of the chipset - the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition (Crush 19) represents the Northbridge, the version for AMD processors is used as Southbridge.

The board will only be able to carry Pentium processors using the socket 775. Sources told us that Gigabyte is currently testing the 4-GPU board and is likely to enable two configurations. First, the GA-8N-SLI Quad will be able to work with two Gigabyte 3D1 dual-GPU cards and make an additional three PCI Express slots available. The second option is to use single-GPU SLI graphics card in each of the four slots. This translates to a support of either two x16 or four x8 PCI Express slots.

Other features of the GA-8N-SLI Quad include four slots for DDR2 memory for a total of 4 GByte memory, four SATA II ports, ten USB 2.0 and three IEE1394a interfaces.