Gigabyte GA-8N SLI Quad Royal
Aside from the fact that this desktop motherboard comes with four physical x16 PCI Express slots, the new flagship looks rather normal. It is a full-sized ATX motherboard that comes with a decent four-phase voltage regulator, four extra fan headers to give users enough options to attach cooling devices, and four DDR2 DIMM sockets for up to 4 GB of memory. It also has several interfaces and features, most of which are typical for modern boards in the enthusiast space.
There are two Gigabit Ethernet ports, one powered by NVIDIA's nForce4 integrated logic that includes the ActiveArmor hardwire firewall support, the other one using Marvell's 88E1111 solution. The board features four SATA II ports with support for 300 MB/s interface speed and Native Command Queuing (NCQ,) ready to hook up your hard drives, and two more UltraATA/133 ports to take care of optical drives or older hard drives you might want to keep using.
Gigabyte provides a Firewire controller from Texas Instruments, featuring two ports. A total of ten USB 2.0 ports can be used; four are integrated into the back panel, while six others require either adapters for slot panels in order to be used, or they can be linked to front USB ports your computer case might have. Gigabyte provides a port 80 debug solution based on a two-digit display, as well as the well renowned DualBIOS feature that provides a backup should a BIOS update fail.
Lately we have been criticizing boards with floppy connectors that are placed at the bottom of a motherboard, as cables usually aren't long enough to attach a floppy drive that is somewhere up in a tower case. Also, the south bridge - excuse me, the nForce4 SLI chip - requires active cooling, but this is because a fan large enough for keeping the chip cool would interfere with a PCI Express graphics card in slot #2. These are all design compromises made necessary by the sheer number of slots and components on this motherboard.
