Gigabyte 8KNXP is the latest offering from Gigabyte and has one of the most complete features workstation board ever design. It supports the new 800Mhz CPUs, SCSI, Gigabit Ethernet, Hyper-Threading Technology, 6-channel sound, IDE RAID, SATA RAID 0

In our tests, we find that the performance of this board is on par with most of the other 2 Canterwood boards we have reviewed so far. Some noticable stability problem is that when we use it with our Kingston DDR400 modules which is not rated for CAS 2, 5-2-2. In order to stabalise the system, we pump the DIMM to 2.7v.

This board has a nice feast of features and some special ones that deserves mentioning is the IDE RAID. Most of the Canterwood boards focuses on the SATA but has forgotten about IDE RAID. To compensate that, Gigabyte did not supply SATA RAID 1 using an additional chipset but uses the ICH5R inbuilt SATA RAID 0 for SATA connections. For those who uses SCSI, this is also the high end board you would want to look for since it comes with an Adaptec on board SCSI. Usually we  don't expect overclocking features on workstation boards. Gigabyte 8KNXP just like other manfuacturers included that for you. FSB can be 100~355 FSB selectable and voltage adjustments can be made for Vdimm, Vcore, VAgp. The PCI/AGP can also be fixed to 33/66 or other settings available through the BIOS. We tested the board and managed to run max at 220Mhz FSB at cpu:fsb=1:1 ratio. This makes it at around 3.3Ghz.

The board comes with a pictorial guide on how to install the board. It is easy to read and it maps the necessary information for a quick and easy setup of the board within minutes. The BIOS is also multilingual and you can change it accordingly.  The colour coding of the front panel connector proves useful for system integrators and end users for easy identification of the connectors.

Overall, an impressive board that has almost all the things any one would ever thought of. The only disappointment is that it doesn't come with SATA RAID 1, 1394 is not there and no upgrade capability to include a Wi-Fi connector or bluetooth. The Vcore adjustments is also quite limited and I hope that can be improved in future BIOS upgrades.

Suggested Retail : -

Discuss

Pros 好处:

• SCSI
• 6 Channel audio
• USB 2.0 
• Gigabit LAN
• 1394
• SATA
• Overclocking - up to 355Mhz FSB, PCI /AGP FIX selectable
• IDE RAID

Cons 坏处:

• No SATA RAID 1 only RAID 0 by ICH5R
• No 1394
• Vcore tweakable max is too low

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

Silver Award