GIGABYTE - Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 nForce4 Ultra Motherboard Review

The Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 is simply an amazing board. It’s fully loaded with hardware features like dual Gigabit NICs, it comes with a 802.11g Wireless PCI card, IEEE 1394b, an additional SATA RAID controller, 7.1-channel audio and a dual BIOS. There’s not much more you could add, but expansion options are covered by two PCI Express x1 slots, three 32-bit PCI slots, and a PCI Express x16 slot for videocards.

The performance of the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 was outstanding for most of the benchmarks we put it through. Socket 939 Athlon64 processors are already extremely fast, but somehow nVidia was able to squeeze out just a bit more with its nForce 4 Ultra chipset. Looking at the benchmarks, the GA-K8NXP-9 was first in almost all the tests. It was even able to beat the other motherboards in most 3D tests, despite using a slightly slower videocard (albeit on the PCI Express bus rather than AGP).

Overclocking was limiting because the BIOS contained no multiplier controls, and the voltage options were quite limited. We were still able to get the motherboard up to 217 MHz FSB, however.

While the retail price of the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 motherboard currently remains a mystery, you should expect it to fall in line with Gigabyte’s typical pricing standards. If you’re looking for a top of the line K8 motherboard to go with that state of the art Socket 939 Athlon64 chip, and PCI Express videocard, look no further than the GA-K8NXP-9. It’ll keep you happy for a very long time!

PC Stats Editors Choice Award

Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 nForce4 Ultra
Motherboard Review @ PC Stats