Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 - motherboard - ATX - nForce4

...of the hardware. Although the Gigabyte does support this (to an extent), it's not the strongest in the market, concentrating instead for straightforward setup and operation with maximum features.

When choosing a motherboard there are a couple of things to consider:
1. The type of CPU that you want to use. The main manufacturers in this area are Intel and AMD so that's the first choice. Then you have to choose the individual ...
...in providing a Dual BIOS Gigabyte are making sure that even if the BIOS breaks, there's a spare one that will allow you to carry on working. It's a neat feature that could potentially save you £100 on a replacement motherboard so by way of an insurance policy I think it's worth paying a few £'s extra for.

This particular motherboard also boasts some interesting features thanks to the nVidia "nForce 4 controller". This set ... more

I'll start off saying that, by necessity, this will be a reasonably technical review that's intended for people that are upgrading or building their own PC. I've tried to include explanations of the terms where possible but it's already going to be a long review.

It's a sad fact of life that, at some point in the course of owning a PC, you find that it no longer has the horsepower to do the stuff you want to. If you're lucky, this point will not be reached for a good number of years but if you continually push the abilities your PC quite a bit, usually through playing the latest games or photo/video editing then you will eventually come to the point where you can't upgrade it anymore without performing major heart surgery. When this time comes, you will invariably find that you need to not only replace the CPU (the brains of the PC), you will usually need to upgrade the motherboard as well.

So what role does the motherboard play in the scheme of things? It's effectively the heart and backbone of a PC - the thing into which everything else must plug into. A large printed circuit board (PCB), the motherboard has innumerable sockets and plugs to accommodate the vast array of components, peripherals and add-ons that make up the modern PC. Once everything is plugged into the motherboard it all gets stuck in a case and the keyboard, mouse etc plugged into the back you've got a PC. Basically it's like static-sensitive Lego, it all just slots together.

So why have I bought this particular motherboard when there are so many to choose from? I've been building/upgrading PCs for a 10 years or more now and, over that time I've used a range of mother boards from a variety of manufacturers. Giga-byte is the name that I've come to trust most in this area. Admittedly there are cheaper manufacturers. Equally there are more expensive ones available but I have found that Giga-byte offers the best balance of features, cost and reliability for my needs.

I'm not big on "over-clocking" my computer - the practice of tweaking the hardware settings to extract every last ounce of performance from a PC, usually at the expense of the longevity of the hardware. Although the Gigabyte does support this (to an extent), it's not the strongest in the market, concentrating instead for straightforward setup and operation with maximum features.

When choosing a motherboard there are a couple of things to consider:
1. The type of CPU that you want to use. The main manufacturers in this area are Intel and AMD so that's the first choice. Then you have to choose the individual CPU from the manufacturer as different CPUs tend to need different sockets. I have an AMD Athlon64 that requires a "Socket 939" for the CPU, so that's what the GA-K8NXP-9 offers. In so-doing the majority of high-end AMD CPUs are supported. Older socket types will limit you to some of the older PCs, so it's generally best to find out which is the newest socket available to at least give you a chance to upgrade without swapping the motherboard out again.

2. The type of Graphics card that you want to use. This didn't used to be as big an issue but recent advances in technology have seen the rise of a new high-performance video interface (PCI-Express) that competes with the older AGP standard. As I was buying a new video card at the same time as the motherboard I decide to go for the newer and so more future-proof solution (PCI-Express) on the basis that it should give me slightly more upgrade opportunities.

3. The type and amount of memory supported by the motherboard. Often over-looked, the speed and amount of memory supported by a motherboard will have a significant impact on it's performance. The GA-K8NXP-9 supports up to 4Gb of DDR400 memory in 4 slots, allowing for plenty of high-performance memory. The newer CPU socket also allows this memory to be accessed in "Dual Channel" mode, meaning it's effectively even faster than it says on the tin.

4. The types of hard drives supported. Historically this wouldn't have been an issue - the standard was for regular ATA hard drives but, as with video cards, technology has moved on and the new standard is Serial ATA (SATA). There are a number of benefits to this new format, not least of which is the significantly improved transfer speeds. The cables are also smaller and easier to manage than the old form; drive capacities have been increased and most SATA motherboards now provide RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) functionality to improve either performance or availability.

RAID comes in a number of flavours but the ones to worry about are 0, 1, 0+1 and 5. Each has its own benefits and limitations and they are significant enough that a quick diversion is probably worthwhile.

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Raid 0 is the most basic form of RAID. Also known as "striping", it effectively binds two (or more) hard drives together into a single, logical disk. Think of it as having two A4 pads of paper and placing them side by side so that a single line of text will begin on one page and run across to the other before starting a new line back on the first page to repeat the process. RAID 0 gives you the best use of your storage space, you get to use the combined disk space of both hard drives, so two 120Gb hard drives in a Raid 0 configuration will give you a logical volume of 240Gb (actually slightly less after formatting but it will be close enough). You will also notice some slight improvement in write speed as the RAID controller is smart enough to be able to write to all the drives in the array at once. The problem with Raid 0 is that if any of the drives in the array suffer a problem, all of the data is lost. So backups are important!

RAID 1 is the complete opposite of Striping and is commonly called "mirroring". As you might guess from the name, Raid 1effectively takes your two A4 pads and whatever is written on the first one also gets written to the second one. So your two 120Gb drives in a RAID 1 configuration will give you 120Gb of storage. The big advantage here is that if one of your disks fails, your data remains safe allowing you to replace the faulty disk and rebuild the array. While write performances aren't significantly improved, read performance is because the controller can look at data on both disks and search for it slightly faster.

RAID 0+1 is what it sounds like, a combination of Striping and Mirroring. This requires at least 4 disks, and effectively sees you set up a stripe across two disks and then mirror that stripe to the other two disks. Consequently it comes with the pros and cons of both and 4 x 120Gb drives will only give you 240Gb of storage.

RAID 5 is the compromise to 0+1 and instead of mirroring a stripe to achieve data recovery, it does some clever maths and distributes enough information across the members of the array to allow for the array to be rebuilt should one of the member disks fail. This means that a RAID 5 array will need at least 3 drives. In our 120Gb example, 3 x 120Gb drives in a RAID 5 configuration will give you approximately 240Gb of usable storage. Because the array controller must do the sums to distribute recovery data across the array members it tends to be faster for reads than writes.

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The GA-K8NXP-9 is ahead of the competition when it comes to storage. Offering two SATA controllers each capable of controlling 4 hard rives; the first offers 1.5Gb/s and supports RAID type 0, 1 or 5; the second supports SATA at 3.0Gb/s and supports RAID 0 or 1. Not content with supporting 8 SATA hard drives, there are also two standard IDE interfaces that support a total of 4 ATA133 drives (or more normally, a CD/DVD drive) allowing a whopping 12 drives to be installed in total!

5. Expansion is the last of the big things to consider. As you start to increase the capabilities of a PC, you generally start to add more components to it, usually in the shape of extra cards that are installed into the motherboard. When choosing a motherboard it's therefore important to consider how many features are built into it and how many expansion cards it will support. The GA-K8NXP-9 is well specified in this regard. It comes with the following features built-in:
- 2 network ports (both are Gigabit Ethernet)
- A soundcard that supports 7.1 digital sound
- 4 USB ports (with support for an additional 6!)
- 2 Firewire ports
It also has a high-speed PCI-Express graphics slot, two normal PCI-Express ports and three "traditional" PCI ports meaning it's pretty capable of handling upgrades, including things like TV-tuner cards, modems, wireless networking cards etc.
While we're on the topic of expansion cards, I will also mention that the GA-K8NXP-9 comes complete with a PCI Wireless networking card that supports the latest 54Mb/s 802.11g networking standard (as well as the older 802.11b standard).
That's the majority of the connectivity talked about but there are a host of other features that set this motherboard apart from the competition. Giga-Byte has, for quite a long time now, provided "Dual BIOS". Without a BIOS a motherboard is just another broken collection of electronic components, so in providing a Dual BIOS Gigabyte are making sure that even if the BIOS breaks, there's a spare one that will allow you to carry on working. It's a neat feature that could potentially save you £100 on a replacement motherboard so by way of an insurance policy I think it's worth paying a few £'s extra for.

This particular motherboard also boasts some interesting features thanks to the nVidia "nForce 4 controller". This set of chips is responsible for governing the communications between the main components, at a higher level than the BIOS. It governs the way memory is accessed, the way instructions are sent from the CPU to the graphics card, even communications to the hard drives and the network.

The benefits of the nForce 4 chipset include; Dual-Channel memory for higher bandwidth and faster memory access; support for the latest AMD Athlon chips, including the new Dual-Core CPUs; nVidia's "Active Armor" technology that embeds firewall functions into hardware meaning they are virtually impossible to bypass.

The last point of note on the motherboard is the "Dual Power System". A daughter-board plugs into a slot next to the CPU and provides clean, stable power for the CPU in support of future possible upgrades. It also comes with a whizzy looking heatsink complete with blue LED inside the fan. Unfortunately it's at this point that I become disappointed. The DPS daughter board caused me nothing but trouble - reboots and refusals to start from cold were the main symptoms. Luckily, the motherboard is perfectly capable of running without it so I simply removed it.
Installation is very simple. Colour-coding of the sockets is used to good effect and all of the standard component fixings ensure that things snap, lock and screw into place just as they should. No special tools are needed and, thanks to the clever design of the packaging, you can turn the box into a staging platform to make sure that all your pieces fit together and that the motherboard runs outside of the case before you install it. This can be surprisingly useful as short circuits after installation into the case can be a problem and hard to detect.

The supplied CD comes with a host of software, including all of the special drivers to get the most out of the nVidia chipset, the onboard sound and network capabilities as well as the RAID controllers. It's at this point that I would mention the RAID drivers. If you are hoping to set up a RAID volume for your basic Windows partition you will need to extract the RAID drivers from the CD and put them on a floppy disk. The reason for this is that Windows needs access to a floppy disk with any 3rd-party RAID drivers on it at the time of installation if it's going to be able to write to the logical volume. This can be a problem, particularly if you haven't built a floppy drive into your machine - I'm surprised that Windows won't consider looking for a CD with the drivers on but trust me, it HAS to have a floppy disk.

Once you're up and running it's worth checking out the Giga-Byte support site as it's more than likely the software supplied on the CD is out of date, with newer drivers being available on the web. This is particularly true for the on-board soundcard which is almost incapable of playing back MP3s without an upgrade! Fortunately the Giga-Byte website is well laid out and it's easy to find the files you need.

Aside from the necessary drivers Giga-Byte also supply a trial version of Norton Anti-Virus and some software that is used to drive the more advanced features of the motherboard. This includes the Dual BIOS recovery utility and the Easy-Tune software that allows for simple over-clocking as well as advanced control of most aspects of the motherboard (from CPU speed to memory voltage and frequency right through to the video card and PCI frequencies). The EasyTune software also gives you some basic health statistics for your PC like Fan speed, CPU temperature etc and allows you to set alarms should comfort levels be exceeded.

Once up and running it's proven wonderfully stable. I rarely shut down my PC so it frequently sees very long periods of use and has probably been turned off for a total of 3 weeks in the last 6 months. During that time, the only problems I have experienced were those related to the soundcard drivers, which were easily upgraded, and the DPS facility which were remedied by removing the nuisance card. Other than that it's an outstanding piece of hardware.

The wide range of CPU support and degree of future-proofing is exceptional. The storage options are class-leading and the performance is up there with the best. The number of integrated features (6 USB2.0 sockets, 3 firewire sockets, 2 Gigabit Ethernet connections, 7.1 sound with both digital and analogue output) and the supplied software all add up to one impressive package.

When it comes to scores, you'd be forgiven for thinking I'm going to give it 5 stars. As it happens, I'm only going to give it 4! The reason for this mark-down is that Giga-Byte also produce a motherboard called the GA-K8N-Ultra9 which is basically the same minus the Dual Power System and costs less money. Given the problems I had with DPS, combined with performance tests on the Internet which show that the Ultra-9 is slightly faster. I can't, with a clear conscience, award it top marks as I know there are better solutions available.
 

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