Gigabyte K8NXP9

Gigabyte's K8NXP9 is the first motherboard we've seen designed around the new Nforce4 Ultra chipset from Nvidia, providing PCI Express (PCX) support for AMD processors. The chipset works with Socket 939/940 Athlon64 and Athlon64 FX chips, with dual-channel DDR400 memory.

Other features include a controller for four Sata ports, allowing for data transfers of 300Mbytes/sec (a 3Gbits/sec total), hot swapping and NCQ (native command queuing).

There's the next generation of integrated Gigabit Ethernet, which includes a hardware firewall - Nvidia calls it the Active Armour secure networking engine - and support for up to 10 USB2 ports and 7.1 audio, but the chipset doesn't offer integrated FireWire.

Gigabyte has gone for a Socket 939 with this board, and there's plenty of room around it should you wish to use a larger cooler for overclocking. Next door, four Dimm slots support up to 4GB of DDR400/333/266 or 200 memory.

Gigabyte has included two 1X PCX slots and a 16X graphics interface, as well as three standard PCI slots. There are three USB2 headers on the board (for up to six ports) and four more ports on the back panel.

The K8NXP9 offers two ATA-133 interfaces joined by eight Sata ports, four provided by the Nforce chip and another four by a Silicon Image controller. The latter can be configured for Raid 0 (striping), Raid 1 (mirroring) and Raid 1+0 (mirrored stripe).

Contact:
Gigabyte 01908 362 700
www.gigabyte.com.tw

Specifications:

• Socket 939
• Nvidia Nforce4
• 4 Dimm slots
• 16X PCX graphics slot, 2 1X PCX slots and 3 standard PCI slots
• Dual 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet
• Dual Bios
• Integrated 7.1 audio
• 8 Sata connectors
• 4 USB2 ports (support for up to six more)
• 2 PS/2
• 1 serial port
• 1 parallel port