Motherboards

Top budget motherboard

Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro-SLI
Looking for a good motherboard on a tight budget? If so, you may want to check out Gigabyte’s GA-K8N Pro-SLI. The Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro-SLI is the little brother to Gigabyte’s GA-K8N Ultra-SLI.

As its name implies, the board is based on NVIDIA’s high-end nForce4 SLI chipset, only it’s designed for the mainstream market. Unlike Gigabyte’s more expensive K8N Ultra-SLI board, the K8N Pro-SLI is priced just over $100, Newegg for instance currently sells the board for just $106. That $100+ buys you a lot of motherboard though.



For starters you’ve got Gigabyte’s battle-tested DualBIOS. With DualBIOS, Gigabyte places two BIOS chips on the board. If your primary BIOS goes down, just revert back to the second chip. This feature protects your motherboard from a bad BIOS flash or virus.

Gigabyte also uses Realtek’s popular ALC850 8-channel CODEC on the K8N Pro-SLI. This is the exact same audio solution used on more expensive $150+ nForce4 SLI motherboards. The board’s most unique feature though (besides DualBIOS) is its support for IEEE-1394b. With transfer speeds of up to 800Mb/sec, 1394b provides double the peak theoretical bandwidth of IEEE-1394, which is important for you home video buffs transferring home movies from your camcorder to your PC. The board also provides support for all the standard features you expect from NVIDIA’s nForce4 SLI chipset, including GigE networking, 3Gb/sec Serial ATA with RAID, and of course support for the latest Athlon 64/FX/X2 processors.

Gigabyte’s BIOS options aren’t the greatest, so tweakers looking for the most flexibility may want to look elsewhere, but for ~$100 you can’t expect the greatest. Likewise, some enthusiasts have complained that Gigabyte’s 100% passive cooling solution isn’t the most robust in the world. But again, for $100, you can’t expect anything exotic. And besides, if your budget allows, you can drop in additional cooling for just a few bucks more.

Alternatives

With prices on nForce4 SLI motherboards dropping rapidly, picking up a good budget nForce4 SLI board is pretty easy nowadays, as evidenced by the Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro-SLI. We feel that by going the SLI route, you’ve got more upgrade flexibility in the long run.

But if $100 is too much to spend on a new motherboard, NVIDIA’s GeForce 6150 series are becoming pretty popular among the budget crowd. The chipset offers all the features found in NVIDIA’s other nForce4 chipsets with the addition of integrated GeForce 6200 TurboCache-derived graphics. The GeForce 6150 GPU features a 2-pixel pipeline/1 vertex engine architecture and runs at 475MHz. The 6150 is also equipped with a TV encoder, support for DVI and component output, and the ability to accelerate high definition MPEG2 and WMV9 playback, making it perfect for home theater PC (HTPC) applications.

ASUS offers their A8N-VM CSM. The A8N-VM CSM features four Serial ATA RAID ports as well as GigE and x1 and x16 PCI-E slots. As an added bonus, ASUS provides both VGA and DVI outputs on the A8N-VM CSM, making it ideal for both flat panel and CRT users alike. The best part though is the pricetag, currently the board sells for $88 on Newegg!