|
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
Setup of the board was fairly easy and went without difficulty. One thing I like about GIGABYTE's layout of the board is the positioning of the 24-pin ATX connector. It's to the far right of the board, allowing the user to insert the ATX power cable without much hassle as to IDE cables, as some boards tend to have. The positioning of the 4-pin power connector is in a less than optimal location, requiring you to route the power cable around the CPU heat sink. The rest of the layout of the board is generally excellent. One nice touch is the SATA ports have solid connectors. It's virtually impossible to just snap off the SATA cable from the board without an inordinate amount of force. The positioning of the PCI Express x1 slots allows you to run a 7800GTX or 6800 Ultra SLI setup, while leaving 1 PCI Express x1 slot and 2 PCI slots free for expansion cards if needed.  North Bridge  South Bridge  DPS Slot  DPS Card GIGABYTE includes a heat sink covering the North Bridge chip and the South Bridge chip. NVIDIA's AMD nForce4 only has the MCP chip, due to the memory controller being on the AMD CPUs. Intel chipsets require both a North and South Bridge. One thing I noticed while the Royal board was in operation was the chipset heat sink got exceedingly hot, a common occurrence with nForce4 motherboards. Below the CPU socket is a slot for GIGABYTE's DPS (Dual Power System). DPS regulates voltage along with the MOSFETs, allowing for a more stable system. Bundle
Motherboard bundles are important to me as they show the care the manufacturer has for the customer. In my experience, some motherboard manufacturers are skimpy, especially with IDE cables, SATA cables and other hardware accessories beyond the bare minimum. Too often, I've seen a motherboard manufacturer include one SATA cable and one IDE cable. To me as a reviewer, I much prefer to see comprehensive bundles that maximize the experience the user has with their new motherboard. GIGABYTE really went all out in their motherboard bundle for the GA-8N-SLI Royal motherboard. First thing of note is the inclusion of enough SATA cables to fully max out the available SATA ports on the board with 6 SATA cables and 3 SATA power cables to power them. Second thing of note is the inclusion of 3 USB 2.0 brackets bringing the total on the board to 10+2 IEEE1394 ports. The inclusion of a Bluetooth adapter allows the motherboard to be used as a wireless network a definite plus in my book. Software-wise, the bundle GIGABYTE included with the motherboard is top-notch. GIGABYTE includes a full version of Norton's Internet Security 2005 software. This includes Norton's AntiVirus software, Norton Personal Firewall, Norton Privacy Control, Norton AntiSpam, and Norton Parental Control. This is the latest version of the software available.         The GA-8N-SLI board comes with a selection of GIGABYTE utilities including EasyTune, DMI Info Viewer, @BIOS and FaceWizard. EasyTune has two modes for overclocking, easy mode and advanced mode. Easy mode allows you to overclock your CPU in 1% increments automatically. Advanced mode allows you to change the FSB, the Memory frequency, the AGP/PCI Express bus frequency, the PCI frequency, the CPU, Memory and AGP/PCI Express voltage and the CPU ratio. SmartFAN controls the CPU fan speed and target temperature. Hardware Monitor monitors the voltage of the VCore, the 3.3V rail, the 12V rail, and the battery, the fan speed of the CPU, Power1 and System fan. It also monitors the CPU temperature. Contents: 
|
|
|||||||||||||||
