Gigabyte K8VNXP is the 3rd board we review at OCW Labs. Similar to the K8NNXP, this board which is based on the VIA K8T800 chipset has the the 6 Duals.It has the 6 Duals, Dual Power System, Dual Cooling, Dual BIOS, Dual CPU Bandwidth, Dual LAN, Dual RAID. It also uses 1394b which is faster. SATA RAID, IDE RAID all ready for utmost connectivity.

With the innovative function of Universal Audio Jack (UAJ) of ALC 658 AC97 codec, this platform provides superior 6-Channel stereo without the distress for wrong installation.  This platform is the first motherboard with IEEE1394b FireWire interface from Texas Instruments (TI). With the transfer speed up to 800Mb/s, the new generation IEEE1394b interface further enhances PC connectivity with consumer electronics audio/video (A/V) appliances, and storage peripherals.

This board also supports Serial ATA RAID and IDE RAID. The on board GigaRAID IDE RAID Controller. Supporting RAID (0, 1, 0+1), JBOD function and ATA133 interface, GigaRAID Controller delivers completely solution for storage interface to increase fault tolerance, improve data access performance and provides additional interface for more IDE devices. The Serial ATA RAID 0 and 1 is supported by VIA 8237 South Bridge.

Performance of this board is pretty good especially when dealing with data crunching. As we can see from the benchmarks, the less IDE dependent benchmarks scores better. As the memory controller is built into the CPU, the overall system performance would most probably very dependent on the HTT and IDE performance. Although the VIA K8T800 implements a full 16 bits processor-to-chipset HyperTransport link. The VLink could be the bottleneck that affected some of the scores of some benchmarks. The IDE performance is also not as strong as the other two.

Installation is quite straightforward as the front panel connectors are all colour coded. The speakers/mic/line in also has the jack sensing feature making it easier for you as we won't need to bother which jack should which plug goes to. The documentation is quite clear in its descriptions of setting up RAID arrays.

Overclocking wise, we managed to pull it up to 218MHz FSB at CAS 2.5, 6-3-3. It is quite stable at that FSB. For max stability, we increase the DIMM voltage by +0.1v.

Suggested Retail : NA

Discuss & read more

Pros 好处:

• 6 Channel audio
• USB 2.0 
• Dual LAN Gigabit + 10/100Mbps Ethernet
• 1394
• SATA RAID, IDE RAID
• DPS

Cons 坏处:

• Clear CMOS Jumper has no pins for clearing cmos
• Chipset's heatsink might block some graphics cards
• No Async fsb:memory modes

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.