One Tough Cookie: 10 Boards with Intel i875P Chipset: Part I

Gigabyte GA-8KNXP Ultra: Maximum Features On Board

Board revision 1.0, BIOS m5

A look at the packaging of the Gigabyte GA-8KNXP - not quite complete in our case.

Full house: no other candidate offers more extras.

Company tradition: Dual BIOS chips.

Of all the test candidates, the Gigabyte offers the most extensive features. As well as the generously equipped six-layer board, it includes almost all cables for installation in the PC: three IDE cables for Ultra-DMA/100, one floppy and two Serial-ATA cables, as well as a very long SCSI cable, including terminator. There are also three different slots with four USB 2.0 connections, and both analog and digital audio outputs.

A special feature of the colorful test board is the inclusion of six DIMM slots, but RAM expansion is technically limited by the memory pages. As the Intel i875 chipset can manage a total of eight pages, the six DIMM slots remain rather questionable. The two additional slots make sense if the user only has single-sided RAM modules.

Also striking are the light green AGP-Pro slot, the CSA-LAN interface, the ICH5-RAID controller, the traditional dual BIOS function and the additional RAID controller for IDE. Additional noise is produced by the active Northbridge cooler, which - in contrast to the competition (Abit and MSI) - is not regulated. A temperature-dependent speed control should be included.