FIRST LOOK - nForce4: Gigabyte K8NXP-9
by Wesley Fink on November 12, 2004 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
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.
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49 Comments
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wohlgek - Thursday, February 24, 2005 - link
Does anyone know when these boards will be available? Also, on Gigabyte's website, they show the board as compatable with only CPU's with the 130 nm process. What about the Winchester core? Is it safe to assume that all you would need is a bios update to use the Winchester core over the Newcastle? (Sorry if it is a newb question).Marcosoft - Thursday, December 23, 2004 - link
I just bought this card and i'm having troubles to make it work.I have a 20-pin plug so i leaved the 4 pins out !
So far, i shouldn't have any problems ?
But do i need to plug at least a ATX_12V next to the CPU ?
Filibuster - Saturday, December 4, 2004 - link
When are these supposed to be available?TheDevil - Wednesday, November 24, 2004 - link
God I pray to U to keep this boards pricing under 400$ (18.000 Rs) in the Excise ridden country of India :@ so I can promptly Buy it asap.peegee - Saturday, November 20, 2004 - link
ONLY 4Gb - why??surely it could address 8Gb, as 2Gb chips are becoming more available.
thats a deal breaker for me - I need 8Gb.
flexy - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
>>>#37 - It has a 24-pin ATX with a plug for 4-pins so it can be used with standard 20-pin. It is shipped with the plug in place so there is no confusion with where the 20-pin goes. Pop out the plug with a fingernail and it is 24-pin.
>>>
Wesley,
Question 1 : Are there any benefits in using the 24p method over the 20pin method ? The additional 4 pins provide power the for pci-e slot from what i know.
If i leave the 4 pins out...isn't there any disadvantage - eg. less power provided to the pci-e card etc ?
Was there a manual with the nforce 4 boards you tested where they mention anything in that matter and recomend 24p over 20p ? Or does it matter at all ?
Question 2:
does that board have a pci-lock ??? Eg. i am shooting for pretty high 'FSB' (280, 290) and need a working pci-lock for SATA :)
thanks !!
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
#42 - Thanks for asking the question. Those values are in fact an error in the pre-release BIOS that have been corrected with a BIOS update. There are not any AGP voltage adjustments on the nF4 board.I have corrected the table of Features. I apologize for not catching that in the review.
jcromano - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
#40 Thank you very much for your answers. I felt at the time that my questions were probably pretty dumb, but I decided to ask anyway. And now, I'm going to risk yet another dumb question: Page 2 of the review ("Basic Features") has a table that says the AGP voltage can be set to normal or to several overvolted values. Why in the world would you need an AGP voltage if there's no AGP slot, and how would that voltage be delivered? (It is, in fact, that table that convinced me the long black slot must be an AGP slot and sent me looking elsewhere for the PCIe slots.)Wesley Fink - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
#37 - It has a 24-pin ATX with a plug for 4-pins so it can be used with standard 20-pin. It is shipped with the plug in place so there is no confusion with where the 20-pin goes. Pop out the plug with a fingernail and it is 24-pin.#39 - Our launch review of the nForce4 did a complete performance comparison with nF3 Ultra, so we saw no reason to repeat that information. There is basically no performance difference in the 2 chipsets. The review is at http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
nF4 is for PCIe and nF3 is for AGP. nF4 also adds a very few features like 3Gb/s SATA. There is also no current difference in performance between AGP and PCIe video cards - the same model yields the same performance - but that will likely change in the future.
Gioron - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
#34:No, this board only has a PCI-E x16 slot for graphics card, no AGP slot. The long black slot just above the gold-colored chipset is the PCI-E x16 slot. The white slots to its left are the PCI slots, not the PCI-E slots. The PCI-E x1 slots are actually the rather short, black ones on the right side of the long PCI-E x16 slot. Note that all of these slots are positioned on the side of the board with the external motherboard connections, and are in front of slot covers that you can see in the back on both of the pictures. This is important for an expansion slot, so thats always the first place to look.
The red and green slots you mention are actually the IDE sockets for either hard drives or CD/DVD drives. The black slot below them is for a floppy drive. The yellow sockets in the corner look like USB sockets, and at two ports per socket, that supplies all 6 of its non-paneled USB ports. The red sockets are SATA, although I wish they would've color coded them to indicate which are 3G/s and which are 1.5G/s.