MSI P4N Diamond & Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI

Gigabyte makes yet another fully featured board as you’d expect coming from a tier one motherboard manufacturer. They've provided support for IEEE 1394 Firewire ‘B’ (800MBit) and dual Gigabit Ehternet but the board lacks any kind of High-Definition audio codec, opting for the legacy AC’97 audio instead, albeit in the best 8 channel codec currently available for it in the ALC850.

The blue PCB is a good colour and although it does not carry a colour theme it does carry a range of colours to differentiate the different components to help more unfamiliar users and add contrast for everyone else.

Again we find another inferno-like southbridge, but even though Gigabyte don’t include a copper core like the MSI it still remains stable enough under normal conditions. The northbridge also gets warm, although not finger-melting during stock operation but the additional 40mm fan provided should be used if you intend to overclock or have poor case-airflow in our opinion. Incidentally, if you find the northbridge fan with funky blue LED’s either too loud (which is unlikely) or annoyingly bright (less unlikely) you can easily swap it out for another 40x40x10mm if you feel the need.

Again, as Gigabyte use the same the NForce chipset as MSI the SATA2 and IDE channels now support RAID 5 as well as all of the other common RAID modes in order to compete with Intel’s ICH7(R) southbridge. However, as with the MSI P4N Diamond, the GA-8N SLI Royal has connectors for the two IDE channels supported by the NVIDIA chipset in contrast to Intel's belief that only a single IDE connector is required these days.

The front panel pins are colourfully arranged and labelled so as you can easily pick out which does what and all the necessary connectors are well placed around the edges of the board for ease of use. The rear I/O panel is features the usual components of PS/2, single serial and parallel ports, optical and digital RCA S/PDIF, four USB 2.0 ports, two RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet sockets and six 3.5mm audio jacks for the 8-channel audio. There's no S/PDIF in on the back panel, but there is the option to use this via a connection on the motherboard.