Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 is the first NF4 Ultra mainboard that arrived at our labs days ago. As this is the first mainboard that features a PCI-E slot, we can only compare to the other K8 S939 AGP platforms so that we get an idea of its performance.

In our tests, GA-K8NXP-9 runs steadily even when we run it at aggressive timings of CAS 2, 11-3-2. We tried to run it at 11-2-2 but the system auto reboots or BSOD. Maybe a better cooler would help. The cooling of the chipset used a thermal pad instead of the conventional thermal paste. In most benchmarks, we can see that the GA-K8NXP-9 beating the rest of the boards  in performance. The most interesting observation we found is that in tests like DOOM 3, the GA-K8NXP-9 wins a similarly configured P4 system by almost 25% in graphics performance.

The GA-K8NXP-9 is a feature packed board with 3 x 1394b, USB 2.0, 4 SATA RAID 0/1/0+1 and 4 SATA Sil 3114 supported RAID 5 ports. on top of that, there are 2 Gigabit Ethernet connections available, one native while the other is via PCI-E bus. This reduces the network bottleneck compared to traditional design relying on PCI bus.

Overclocking wise, this board doesn't seem to provide enough as the FSB is limited to 250MHz. Although it provides voltage controls for Vcore, Vdimm, VAGP and Vhtt, it lacks one of the most important feature, multiplier control. We tried to use software to lower down the multiplier, it works but after reboot, the system won't POST if we increase the FSB above 220MHz despite running the memory in async mode e.g cpu/mem = 200/166. We hope the production unit would improve in this aspect. *latest : according to Gigabyte, a new bios update will include new multiplier option and improve overclocking.

If you thought that Intel boards are the only ones that can support PCI-E graphics and native NCQ SATA, the wait is over. GA-K8NXP-9 not only supports PCI-E, it also supports what was supposedly missing on AMD platform in the past years. This includes native SATA with NCQ support, built in firewall, PCI-E, gigabit Ethernet. In fact, it is already proven in our benchmark tests that this board coupled with a FX-53 outperforms a P4 3.6E with the same amount of RAM and Graphics card installed.

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Pros

• USB 2.0 
• Gigabit ethernet
• Firewall
• 1394b
• NCQ SATA ports
• Dual BIOS

Cons

• Voltage selections limited

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.