Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra SLI review

The GA-K8N Ultra SLI is Gigabyte's latest motherboard to use nVidia's nForce 4 SLI chipset.

It also features technology that enables it to use the company's 3D1 graphics cards, which place two graphics cores on a single card - SLI without the hassle of installing two cards.

The board comes with the SLI module, too, so you can put it into conventional SLI mode and install two graphics cards in the dual PCI-E x16 slots. This blocks a PCI-E x1 slot, but leaves another free and still gives you two PCI slots for expansion.

This motherboard provides a good base for a powerful computer, with support for any Socket-939 AMD processor and dual-channel DDR memory. Its scores of 116 in our application benchmarks and 4,281 in PCMark04 are what we'd expect from an SLI motherboard, just behind the pace of our Hotlist's ECS KN1 Extreme SLI.

However, motherboards aren't just about performance, and features can often swing the decision. With the GA-K8N SLI Ultra you have nothing to worry about, as it's one of the most feature-packed motherboards we've seen. The board has four USB2 ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports plus 7.1 audio outputs. There are three further USB2 headers and a FireWire header, and Gigabyte provides the necessary port plates in the box, so you can use what you need.

There are eight SATA2 ports (four normal, four RAID), so storage won't be a problem. Again, Gigabyte provides all the cables you need in the box, all colour coded to match the ports.

What's more, the Ga-K8N Ultra SLI is completely silent thanks to its passive cooling. As many motherboards carry at least one fan, this is a great choice if you want to build a powerful yet quiet computer.

Author: David Ludlow