FIRST LOOK - nForce4: Gigabyte K8NXP-9

Our Take

In this First Look at the Gigabyte K8NXP-9, we come away very impressed with the features and performance of the first shipping nForce4 board. We have been a critic recently of Gigabyte adding everything but the kitchen sink to their top-of-the-line boards. This is because the features often made no sense at all, being little more than "check-list" items. As an example of this, Gigabyte did not implement the nVidia on-chip Gigabit LAN on their nForce3 Ultra board and instead, substituted a PCI LAN chip. Recently, Gigabyte boards have seemed to be more of a checklist of what you could add to a board instead of a thoughtfully engineered product, such as we had come to expect from Gigabyte.

This go-around, it is very clear that Gigabyte has given much more thought to the board design. The added features actually make sense on the K8NXP-9 as part of the whole board. Particularly noteworthy is Gigabyte's decision to include dual Gigabit LAN on their nForce 4 - one an on-chip PHY, and the other on the PCIe bus. We are also happy to see the continued support of 1394B high-speed Firewire, the 6-phase daughter card and the dual BIOS. The only frivolous extra that we see is the 1.5Gb SATA when the nForce4 provides 3Gb SATA, but we could even argue that this is a positive feature if the Silicon Image controller supported peripherals other than hard drives. Overall, Gigabyte has done a very good job with the feature set of the K8NXP-9. It's about time.

It is hard to argue with the excellent stock performance of the K8NXP-9 as it simply tops almost every benchmark compared to nF4 Reference. The memory performance, a very sore spot with the Gigabyte nF3 Ultra design, also seems very solid. This Gigabyte board was a joy to test and was exceptionally stable in all our benchmarks. It certainly appears that Gigabyte heard the litany of complaints about memory performance with the K8NSNXP-939 because the K8NXP-9 is both fast and stable with any memory that we threw at it.

The last area is overclocking or Enthusiast features. We were unfortunately not able to fully test the capabilities of the K8NXP-9 due to the limited Clock frequencies, memory voltage, and CPU ratios available in the pre-release BIOS. Gigabyte Engineers have given us ranges that they say will be included in production BIOS, which we have shared. As soon as the BIOS with expanded ranges is available, we will add an update to this review or include results in a future roundup. The ranges Gigabyte has committed to include will make many Enthusiasts happy. The expanded memory voltages, in particular, would be a first for Gigabyte. That feature will be welcomed indeed by memory overclockers.

It is too early to know if the Gigabyte K8NXP-9 is representative of a great group of nForce4 boards or if it is the standout of the group. For now, if Gigabyte comes through with the BIOS updates that they have promised, we can enthusiastically recommend the K8NXP-9. It's the first Gigabyte board in quite a while that I could comfortably run in my own personal rig, and that isn't faint praise.