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Gigabyte GA-8KNXP Review June 12, 2003 Brandon Bell |
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Summary: With dual Serial ATA RAID controllers, a parallel IDE RAID controller, and support for Intel's latest Pentium 4 processors courtesy of its 875P "Canterwood" chipset, Gigabyte's GA-8KNXP is built for the future. And with bus speeds up to 350MHz offered in BIOS, it has plenty of headroom for overclocking. But that's not all, Gigabyte throws in its DPS2 6-phase power system, DualBIOS, and even a Serial ATA expansion header for the front of your case! See why this board impressed us so much in today's review!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 16 ) |
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Over the years we’ve had the pleasure of watching many companies evolve, expanding into different markets and ultimately attempting to meet the needs of a new group of consumers. Sometimes these transitions can be brutal, with final products that fail to live up to their billing. Said company will then chalk the experience up as a lesson learned and move on, or pack up their products and stay with tried and tested waters, never to enter that market again. Fortunately the latter example doesn’t apply to Gigabyte.Gigabyte Technology, frequently referred to as Gigabyte, has been in the motherboard business for quite awhile, establishing itself as one Taiwan’s largest motherboard manufacturers, right up there with ASUS and MSI. Today Gigabyte is a well-known name in enthusiast circles, but just a few years ago the company relied mainly on its OEM roots.
From OEMs to Prosumers
The OEM market served Gigabyte well, but ultimately the company wanted to compete in the high-end space as well. Gigabyte had a few compelling features going for it. For instance, Gigabyte was the world’s first motherboard manufacturer to implement dual BIOS chips, providing end users with a form of backup protection in case their original BIOS became corrupted. In today’s Internet age of viruses that will attack the system’s BIOS, this feature is a welcome addition. For years Gigabyte was also the only motherboard manufacturer to implement integrated audio from Creative Labs, this was miles ahead of the audio CODECs implemented on most motherboards, if integrated audio was offered at all.
Despite this, Gigabyte’s initial offerings didn’t quite get everything right. Jumperless motherboards from manufacturers like ABIT and ASUS were becoming increasingly popular. In comparison, Gigabyte’s motherboards relied on dipswitches for multiplier adjustment, and the bus speed offerings weren’t as robust. Slowly but surely Gigabyte refined its formula, adopting new technologies and addressing end user’s concerns. Just as the Lamborghini Murciélago wasn’t born overnight, Gigabyte has been steadily tinkering with its board designs, testing new features for performance and stability before they’re finally adopted in the final retail product.
This slow but steady approach has been almost frustrating for us at times. There have been multiple instances where Gigabyte’s motherboards have come oh-so close to motherboard perfection in the roundups we’ve conducted, only to be set back by Gigabyte’s more conservative (read: jumpers and dipswitches) thinking. Then Gigabyte shocked us, and the world, with its 6-Dual Miracle last year.
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The 6-Dual Miracle
For those of you who don’t know, the 6-Dual Miracle is the name Gigabyte has come up with to summarize a few important new features unique to Gigabyte’s motherboards. The first two miracles apply to Intel’s new Pentium 4 processors with Hyper-Threading and the dual-channel nature of the chipset, whether it is 875P, 865P, SiS 655, or E7205. The third, and most interesting miracle is Gigabyte’s Dual Power System (DPS). DPS is essentially an external power source, capable of delivering more juice to the CPU. This gives Gigabyte a six-phase power solution, more than any other motherboard manufacturer. Gigabyte claims that this should extend the durability of the system. With faster processors requiring increasing levels of voltage, you can be rest assured that the DPS has enough power on tap to keep up with Intel’s latest and greatest.
The fourth miracle relates to the dual active cooling solutions Gigabyte has incorporated on its motherboards. One cooling unit with fan is present on the chipset North Bridge, while the DPS module is equipped with active cooling as well. The fifth miracle refers to Gigabyte’s dual RAID controllers, one for Serial ATA drives and the other for parallel drives, while the sixth miracle is for Gigabyte’s tried and true DualBIOS technology we referred to earlier.
For 875P, Gigabyte has refined its 6-Dual miracle technology, and added another feature you won’t find on any other 875P motherboard – 6 DIMM sockets! Lets take a closer look at what this motherboard has to offer.
SIDEBAR: Gigabyte GA-8KNXP Product Webpage
| Feature set | Page:: ( 2 / 16 ) |
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For the GA-8KNXP, Gigabyte fuses Intel’s 875P North Bridge with the ICH5R South Bridge, bringing native Serial ATA support to the chipset, and ultimately, to the GA-8KNXP motherboard itself. We’ve been looking forward to Serial ATA since it was first announced at Intel’s Developer Forum a few years ago, thankfully it’s finally here thanks to ICH5. RAID functionality of the ICH5R chip is limited to RAID Level 0 (striping) and with one hard drive supported per port, therefore you’re limited to just two hard drives. Fortunately, that’s where Gigabyte steps in with additional storage controllers, one of the six miracles we mentioned previously.
Serial ATA RAID
For connecting additional Serial ATA storage devices to the GA-8KNXP, Gigabyte has integrated Silicon Image’s very popular Sil 3112 controller. Like Intel’s ICH5R the Sil 3112 supports up to two hard drives, but goes one step beyond the ICH5R South Bridge in its support for RAID Level 1 (mirroring). The dual Serial ATA RAID controllers should bring grins to the faces of many storage gurus. You can setup multiple RAID arrays for your brand new Serial ATA hard drives, or run them as independent units if you wish. This gives end user’s an incredible amount of flexibility in the disk subsystem department.
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External Serial ATA
One of Serial ATA’s advantages is that it’s hot-swappable, meaning you can connect or disconnect the Serial ATA drive without powering the system off. When you couple this with the capacity of today’s Serial ATA hard drives, this enters in a new era of semi-portable storage capability. But how can you take advantage of this if your Serial ATA ports are built on your motherboard? Simple, provide an external Serial ATA header!
This is exactly what Gigabyte has done with the GA-8KNXP and we can see all kinds of cool ramifications for Gigabyte owners with this feature. It’s actually surprising that more motherboard manufacturers haven’t done this.
GigaRAID
While Serial ATA is the storage interface of the future, there are still millions of consumers with multiple parallel ATA hard drives in their systems. What if these end users need more than the four hard drives the ICH5R natively supports? Or what about the consumer who doesn’t want to pay the premium for Serial ATA drives, opting for storage on the cheap instead? For these users, Gigabyte has also integrated the ITE IT8212 ATA RAID (GigaRAID) controller.
The GigaRAID controller supports RAID Levels 0, 1, and 0+1. In addition, GigaRAID supports JBOD (spanning). Up to four hard drives can be connected to the GigaRAID controller, and since the controller supports the ATAPI-6 specification, end user’s can even connect their CD-ROM drives to the controller.
If you make your own home movies, or use your system as a PVR (personal video recorder for television programming) you’ve probably noticed how quickly you eat away at your hard drive space. Those of you who download MP3s and videos off the Internet are probably running multiple drives as well. For these consumers, the GA-8KNXP would be an ideal solution: you can conceivably connect up to twelve hard drives to this motherboard and it won’t break a sweat!
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SIDEBAR: Gigabyte makes several variants of this motherboard, for instance you can get it without the DPS2 module or the dual RAID controllers (the GA-8IK1100). Or you can even get it with a SCSI controller, the GA-8KNXP Ultra.
| Features (cont’d) | Page:: ( 3 / 16 ) |
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DPS2
If you recall the original DPS system, it brings 6-phase power circuitry to Gigabyte’s motherboards. Unofficially Gigabyte will tell you that this will also have ramifications when overclocking. No, you won’t be able to overclock your processor any further, as that’s entirely reliant on the processor itself, but the motherboard will be able to supply your processor with a steady flow of power at even the most extreme clock speeds. This is one aspect that many 3-phase motherboards lack. As a result, system stability won’t be compromised by the power subsystem of the motherboard, but it will still be up to the end user to take care of properly cooling their processor.
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The new DPS2 module adheres to Intel’s brand new VRM10.0 specification first implemented in its 800MHz bus Pentium 4 processors like the 3.0C GHz chip we tested with today. VRM10.0 basically removes support for the higher core voltages required by Intel’s original Pentium 4 processors based on the “Willamette” core. Gigabyte also claims: “and ready for future coming processor” on its GA-8KNXP packaging. In other words, the GA-8KNXP is ready for Pentium 4 processors based on Intel’s upcoming “Prescott” P4 core.
6 DIMMs
As you’ve seen in our pictures, the GA-8KNXP sports six DIMM sockets, the only 875P motherboard on the market that we’re aware of with this feature. Physically, the GA-8KNXP supports up to 4GB of memory just like any other 875P motherboard, however, with 6 DIMM sockets, end users have more flexibility for memory installation. With 256MB modules being so prevalent, you can load your GA-8KNXP system up with these DIMMs. Just keep in mind that you will have to use single-sided modules in DIMM sockets 2, 3, 5, and 6. Single-sided modules are pretty hard to find these days, so this may come as a bummer to some of you.
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Audio
RealTek’s ALC655 AC’97 CODEC handles audio duties. RealTek’s CODECs are used in a wide variety of motherboards, including NVIDIA’s popular nForce2 with Dolby Digital support. Like Analog Devices’ SoundMAX products, the ALC655 offers jack-sensing technology, meaning it will alert the end user if an audio device is connected improperly. This makes troubleshooting installation problems a snap for inexperienced users.
The sound quality of the RealTek CODEC isn’t bad, in fact if your PC isn’t equipped with a high-end speaker setup you’ll probably find it to be very acceptable, but real audiophiles and gamers will want to pass it up for a dedicated sound card. Gigabyte includes digital outputs and additional speaker connections in an external header. You’d be surprised how often other motherboard manufacturers overlook this feature in particular.
CSA
Intel’s Communications Streaming Architecture makes its presence felt on the GA-8KNXP. CSA provides a direct path between the 875P North Bridge and Intel’s Gigabit Ethernet controller. Offering up to 2Gbps between both components, CSA is a dramatic improvement over the PCI bus’ 133MB/sec that was previously implemented on motherboards with built-in networking. This ensures that the Gigabit network controller can live up to its full potential without bottlenecking the rest of the system. Considering that Gigabyte has implemented two external IDE controllers and Firewire (in addition to USB 2.0) the PCI bus is already burdened enough as it is.
Firewire and USB 2.0
Since the 875P chipset doesn’t offer native Firewire support, this capability is provided by the TSB43AB23 controller from Texas Instruments. An external header provides two ports, one of them being a mini-1394 jack (perfect for use with Sony’s camcorders). Gigabyte earns additional bonus points in our book for providing this feature, although we would like to see them include one additional port, the controller is fully capable of handling this.
USB is provided natively by the 875P chipset. The GA-8KNXP supports up to six USB devices out of the box. Four via the motherboard’s back plate, and two more via external an header.
SIDEBAR: In case you were wondering, the GA-8KNXP runs just fine with the DPS2 module removed.
| Board Analysis | Page:: ( 4 / 16 ) |
Board layout
With so many features built-in to the GA-8KNXP, it should be a seventh miracle that Gigabyte can implement everything on a standard-sized board (30.5cm x 24.4cm according to Gigabyte’s documentation). As usual, Gigabyte equips the board in the company color, blue.
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Since the GA-8KNXP is designed for use in high-end desktops and workstations, a universal AGP Pro slot is used. We can also see that Gigabyte provides plenty of space between the AGP interface and the DIMM sockets, allowing both components to be installed independently of each other. This is a positive trait that we’ve seen on a number of 875P motherboards.
The IDE and floppy connectors that are tied to the chipset are neatly tucked away near the DIMM sockets, while the Serial ATA ports (all four of them) are just underneath the system battery. Unfortunately, Gigabyte has placed the ATX12V connector below the CPU interface, near the left edge of the motherboard. This means you’ll have to string the ATX12V cable between the DPS2 module (if you decide to install it) and the CPU cooler’s fan. The DPS2 module’s fan is recessed pretty deep into the DPS2 housing, reducing the chances that the power cable may accidentally jam it, but the chance is still there. This same danger applies to the CPU and its fan shroud as well. Unfortunately the upper portion of the GA-8KNXP is crammed with so many components that Gigabyte would have been hard-pressed to place the ATX12V connector anywhere else without increasing the size of the PCB.
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Moving a little further down the GA-8KNXP board, we see that the IDE connectors that are tied to the GigaRAID controller are placed alongside PCI slots four and five. This could be an issue for those of you who own multiple PCI cards that are longer than normal, although you do have three other alternatives (assuming you place a PCI card in the slot next to your AGP slot) to choose from. In our opinion, the primary setback is the orientation of the RAID IDE connectors -- being perpendicular to the right edge of the motherboard means that you’ll need a slightly longer cable to hook everything up.
Like DFI’s Canterwood board which we just tested, Gigabyte has chosen to place the third fan header below the fifth PCI slot. We still believe a better location would be on the left side of the board near the AGP slot, as there are a large number of cases with fans located near the motherboard back plate. If the fan header were on the left side of the board, this would be perfect for those cases.
We were definitely disappointed to see Gigabyte remove the jumper to clear BIOS. If you’re an experienced overclocker, the clear CMOS jumper has probably saved you on multiple occasions. With the clear CMOS jumper now removed on our Rev 1.0 board, we had to remove the system battery in order to accomplish this. Hopefully Gigabyte integrate the clear CMOS jumper on a later board revision, as it makes life much easier for overclockers. Of course, Gigabyte will argue that they no longer need the clear CMOS jumper, because of an overclocking feature present on their motherboards that we’ll discuss on the next page.
SIDEBAR: We do wish Gigabyte would come up with catchier names for their motherboards. It’s easy to confuse GA-8KNXP for GA-8KXPN or any other combination for that matter.
| BIOS and Overclocking | Page:: ( 5 / 16 ) |
Gigabyte utilizes the Award interface every enthusiast has grown so familiar with over the years. If you plan on overclocking your processor, the heart of the GA-8KNXP BIOS will likely be the “frequency/voltage control” menu, where you can adjust such parameters as system bus speed, memory bus frequency, and voltages. Lets start there first.
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As we’ve seen from most motherboards, the GA-8KNXP supports bus speed adjustments in 1MHz increments up to 350MHz. Not quite as high as some of the other 875P motherboards we’ve seen, but lets face it, 350MHz is still extreme overkill. You can manually type in the clock frequency you desire, or use the plus and minus keys on your keyboard if you want to do things the slow way.
Gigabyte provides the ability to lock the frequency of your AGP, PCI, and Serial ATA devices. In fact, they offer a wealth of options here. Settings from 66MHz all the way up to 96MHz are available in 1MHz ticks, this is more functionality than even ASUS’ P4C800 Deluxe, which only offers three options.
Likewise, memory ratios are provided so you can lock the frequency of your memory bus. This allows you to run the memory bus independent of the system bus, which can be helpful when overclocking, or for those of you who don’t have DDR400 memory. The GA-8KNXP BIOS will even give you the final frequency for the memory bus and AGP interface.
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CPU voltages are offered up to 1.6V in 0.0125V increments, the most flexible level of voltage adjustment we’ve seen to date, but at just 1.6V, the least robust. We’ve found that we need about 1.65V of juice to get the most of our 3.0C processor when overclocking, so obviously the 1.6V cap puts a slight damper on our overclocking effort. We’ll have those results a little further down this page. For adjusting DIMM voltage, settings of 2.5V, 2.6V, 2.7V, and 2.8V are available while AGP settings can be set as high as 1.8V (in 0.10V increments).
The rest of the GA-8KNXP BIOS is fairly self-explanatory. Keep in mind that you will have to press “Ctrl+F1” to enter the advanced chipset features menu, which is required for manually adjusting memory timings.
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One new feature you will want to keep in mind can be found under the PC health status menu: Smart Fan. Smart Fan monitors can adjust the rotation speed of the CPU and North Bridge fans depending on temperature. In its current form the setting isn’t very powerful, only two options are provided: enabled or disabled. Hopefully in the future Gigabyte can implement a more dynamic variation of Smart Fan that also controls the system fans as well.
Overclocking and EasyTune4
EasyTune4 is meant to bring overclocking to a whole new level of ease, all while within a Windows environment. In addition to frequency adjustment, EasyTune4 also offers hardware monitoring. In its current iteration, EasyTune4 does this job somewhat admirably. For instance, the 1MHz bus adjustments found in BIOS are maintained in EasyTune4’s interface, while CPU, memory, and AGP voltages can be adjusted as well. In addition to these settings, EasyTune4 also offers the selectable memory bus ratio we just discussed in BIOS. Everything sounds good right?
Unfortunately, when it came time to overclock with EasyTune4, we just weren’t able to match the same overclocking success we were able to achieve in BIOS: we made sure that we adjusted the memory ratio and CPU voltage, but despite these falling in line with the same settings we entered in BIOS, EasyTune4 just couldn’t quite pull it off, the system would reboot. For now we’ll just be sticking with BIOS for overclocking, where we were able to overclock our processor to 3.51GHz, a whopping 500MHz overclock!
SIDEBAR: Gigabyte also includes Norton Antivirus in the GA-8KNXP packaging.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 6 / 16 ) |
System Setup
Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz (Hyper-Threading enabled)
ASUS P4C800 Deluxe (875P)
ASUS P4G8X (E7205)
DFI LANPARTY PRO875 (875P)
Gigabyte GA-8KNXP (875P)
512MB OCZ EL PC3200 (DDR400) SDRAM
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO
Driver version CATALYST 3.2
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 9.0
Benchmarks
3DMark 03
Quake III: Arena version 1.17
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter (Elephant Atrium demo)
Unreal Tournament 2003
Comanche 4
Splinter Cell
SIDEBAR: Besides motherboards, Gigabyte also manufactures ATI-based graphics cards.
| 3DMark03 | Page:: ( 7 / 16 ) |
3DMark03
SIDEBAR: Gigabyte manufactures 12 865 motherboard variants!
| 3DMark03 – Frame Rates | Page:: ( 8 / 16 ) |
3DMark03 – Wings of Fury
3DMark03 – Battle of Proxycon
3DMark03 – Troll’s Lair
3DMark03 – Mother Nature
SIDEBAR: We should have some interesting 3D articles coming soon.
| Serious Sam 2 | Page:: ( 9 / 16 ) |
Serious Sam 2 - OpenGL
SIDEBAR: Gigabyte also has its own live BIOS update utility, @BIOS.
| Quake III | Page:: ( 10 / 16 ) |
Quake III - High Quality
SIDEBAR: You can see more on EasyTune4 here
| Comanche 4 | Page:: ( 11 / 16 ) |
Comanche 4 demo
SIDEBAR: Gigabyte also manufactures server products
| Unreal Tournament 2003 | Page:: ( 12 / 16 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 - flyby
Unreal Tournament 2003 - botmatch
SIDEBAR: You can see Gigabyte’s upcoming products at their online Computex show.
| Splinter Cell | Page:: ( 13 / 16 ) |
Splinter Cell – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: If you look at Gigabyte’s online Computex section, you’ll see they have a few Athlon 64 boards in the works.
| SiSoft Sandra 2003 Memory Bandwidth | Page:: ( 14 / 16 ) |
SiSoft Sandra 2003 Memory Bandwidth
SIDEBAR: AGP 8X peaks at 2.1GB/sec.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 15 / 16 ) |
Pros
Performance: Lets face it, any motherboard based on Intel’s 875P chipset is going to be an incredible performer. Anytime you pair 6.4GB/sec of memory bandwidth to a processor like the P4, which loves bandwidth, your result will be impressive performance.
And as you saw in our test results, Gigabyte’s GK-8KNXP performs in line with other 875P motherboards, with the exception being ASUS’ P4C800 Deluxe. This board is just at another level in Turbo mode, which you can saw in our review a few weeks ago.
Basic features: For starters, Gigabyte’s GA-8KNXP utilizes Intel’s Gigabit Ethernet controller with CSA architecture. It doesn’t get any more powerful than this folks. In addition, Intel’s ICH5R sits across from the 875P, bringing native Serial ATA with RAID support directly to the chipset. This is yet another bonus.
If the standard hard drives supported by the Intel chipset aren’t enough, Gigabyte also provides a Silicon Image Serial ATA controller with RAID as well as an ITE RAID controller for conventional hard drives. As a result, the GA-8KNXP is in a class of its own in regards to storage connectivity.
The extras: We really liked the Serial ATA header Gigabyte includes in the GA-8KXNP packaging. With it in place, you can connect a Serial ATA hard drive to your PC on the fly, without having to open up your computer case. We can see all kinds of useful applications for this feature and as of today, Gigabyte is the only manufacturer that provides this capability.
Like ASUS, Gigabyte has their own dynamic cooling technology, dubbed Smart Fan. Smart Fan adjusts the speed of the CPU and North Bridge fans depending on temperature, ensuring that your system is operating at peak efficiency acoustically. Smart Fan isn’t quite as adjustable as Q-Fan, it only offers two settings (on or off) but it will still come as a welcome addition to anyone who would like to reduce the noise level of their system. Gigabyte throws in other extras like a SPDIF bracket, 5 Serial ATA data cables, and a power cable, as well as your obligatory USB and Firewire headers.
6 DIMM sockets: While the GA-8KNXP offers six DIMM sockets, maximum memory size is the same as every other 875P motherboard on the market, 4GB. Also keep in mind that you will have to use single-sided DIMMs on DIMM sockets 2, 3, 5, and 6 if you plan to populate all six DIMMs with memory.
The Miracles: Gigabyte’s “miracles” won’t change the way you game or increase your performance, rather they’re intended to make your platform more reliable, and in the case of Dual RAID, you’ve got an incredible array of data storage options at your fingertips. We hope Gigabyte continues to implement this feature on all of their motherboards going forward.
Memory compatibility: We haven’t run into any compatibility issues with any of the Canterwood boards we’ve tested, although we have found that finding the right memory timings can be a difficult task at first.
Cons
BIOS: Gigabyte has all the nuts and bolts in the rights places in the GA-8KNXP’s BIOS, but the settings themselves just aren’t as powerful as the ones you’ll find on other motherboards. As we said at the outset, Gigabyte has traditionally erred on the side of caution in this respect, and unfortunately we see that in the GA-8KNXP’s current BIOS.
Price: Price Watch prices start at $216 for the GA-8KXNP, while e-tailers like Googlegear have it currently priced at $227. This places it a little higher than most 875P motherboards on the market, but when you consider the added features you’re getting, you can also argue that the GA-8KXNP is a steal.
SIDEBAR: The only feature Gigabyte is really missing with the GA-8KNXP is round floppy and IDE cables.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 16 / 16 ) |
FiringSquad Says:
Gigabyte’s GA-8KNXP is one of the most impressive pieces of motherboard technology we’ve seen in recent memory. Gigabyte has literally addressed all of the 875P chipset’s weaknesses in terms of features.
Upset that 875P doesn’t offer native FireWire support? Gigabyte tackles this by adopting a FireWire controller from Texas Instruments. What about the 2 Serial ATA port ceiling? Gigabyte has resolved this thanks to the integrated Silicon Image Serial ATA controller, and guess what, it also offers native RAID support that is more flexible than Intel’s ICH5R. And for those of you with more than four hard drives in your current system, Gigabyte has coupled the ICH5R with a GigaRAID IDE RAID controller for support of up to four additional storage devices. Short of a full-fledged server, you’d be hard-pressed to find another motherboard with a storage subsystem this robust. And when you factor in the price class the GA-8KNXP sits in, your options quickly to drop to nothing but other Gigabyte motherboards.
We still haven’t discussed DualBIOS, which protects your system from BIOS corruption. Anyone who has ever fallen victim to a corrupted BIOS whether it be an unsuccessful BIOS flash, malicious virus, or just bad luck, will certainly appreciate this feature. Gigabyte’s Serial ATA header is probably its most underrated feature, which is kind of surprising considering the impact it can have for those of you who want gigabytes of storage on the go. Applications like this are just what Intel had in mind when they made Serial ATA hot-swappable.
The DPS2 technology certainly looks interesting on paper, but we haven’t had the GA-8KXNP long enough to know if it really brings any long-term benefits. At least the blue LED looks cool with the blue PCB!
Basically, the only feature we really aren’t sold on with the GA-8KNXP are the six DIMM sockets. The GA-8KXNP supports the same 4GB of memory as every other Canterwood board on the market, and in order to use all six DIMMs you’ll need single-sided memory. We can’t recall the last time we received a single-sided memory module from any of the manufacturers we’ve dealt with, but perhaps things are different overseas.
Hardcore overclockers will be disappointed by the 1.6V core voltage limitation. Frankly, we were a little let down as well. Pentium 4 processors are such terrific overclockers nowadays, getting added performance for free has never been easier. And while we were able to net an extra 500MHz out of our 3.0C/GA-8KXNP combination, we can’t help but feel that we could’ve gone a little bit further had Gigabyte offered just a few more settings. ASUS learned this lesson earlier with the P4C800 Deluxe, going all the way up to 1.95V in ASUS’ current BIOS, hopefully Gigabyte will follow suit and at least give us settings up to 1.7V. This is the GA-8KNXP’s only weakness.
In summary, Gigabyte has definitely raised the bar in sheer hardware feature set for the Pentium 4 platform. For a company that used to be known primarily for its OEM business, it’s quite startling to see so much built onto one motherboard. It takes a lot to impress us, but Gigabyte has done just that with the GA-8KNXP. One of the primary characteristics that goes into any Editor’s Choice product is innovation. In this area, the GA-8KNXP certainly delivers.
SIDEBAR: Drooling over Gigabyte’s GA-8KNXP or are you disappointed in the lack of voltage options for the processor? Feel free to voice your thoughts about this motherboard in the news comments!