With more players releasing mATX boards with GF6150 chipset, it is time to consider making a small compact PC since there are more choices available. GIGABYTE GA-K8N51PVMT-9 is just one of the Gigabyte's offering. Other than the standard feature set offered by the chipsets, the GA-K8N51PVMT-9 package comes with a tv breakout box which allows you to directly hook the board to component video and s-video. This board is quite complete as it comes with a 1394a. It also comes with HD audio, Firewall, SATA II RAID 0,1,5, Purevideo, just to name a few. As the chipset supports Purevideo, we tested the Purevideo clip "Step into Liquid -1080i" version and it played smoothly but at a CPU utilisation of 70-80%. A check using a 6600GT with Purevideo decoder gives me around 65-75%. Looks like the Purevideo is working.

Performance wise, the board is average. Due to the fact that the board has its vdimm fixed at 2.6v, running this board at CAS 2 can be a challenge as most CAS 2 modules require at least 2.75v to work properly. As usual, we tested the board in CAS 2, 5-2-2,1T but it aborted in most tests. We have to slow down the ram timings to CAS 2, 6-3-3, 1T before it gets stable in the various tests ran.

There are some basic overclocking features found in the BIOS. The CLK can be set up to 300 and Cpu multiplier can be selected from 4x~25x. You can also run the board in ASync DDR mode. HT width can also be adjusted. Unfortunately, the bios does not come with voltage adjustments for Vcore, VDIMM at all. In our o/c tests, we only managed to get it run up to  285 x 8 at ASync DDR266.

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