Gigabyte K8VNXP Mainboard

Gigabyte K8VNXP Features:

The rear I/O configuration has 2 PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse, 4 USB 2.0 ports, a parallel port, 2 serial ports, 2 LAN ports (Gb & 10/100), and audio jacks. SPDIF and FireWire are both supported by the board but the connections are found on extra PCI brackets, which also have more audio connections, and 2 USB ports. There are a lot of possibilities having this much connectivity. Power users who are multimedia crazy won't be disappointed looking for places to connect their devices.

Dual LAN is supported by the Realtek 8110S and 8201BL chips. Having dual LAN allows the board to act as network gateway and probably appeals more to office and business applications rather than an everyday gamer. Nonetheless, it gives the board a wide range of uses instead of limiting itself to specific consumers.

IEEE 1394b FireWire is provided by the Texas Instruments TSB82AA2 chip. Speeds of up to 800 Mb/s are supported as well as two independent devices. FireWire is common on most of today's high end mainboards due to the fast speeds at which data can be transferred. There are a number of devices such as digital camcorders, digital cameras, and printers that use FireWire and having it designed onto the board eliminates the need to purchase an extra PCI card.

The Gigabyte K8VNXP comes with dual RAID capabilities. Serial ATA RAID 0 and 1 are supported by the VIA VT8237 chip, while the PATA RAID comes from the GigaRAID chip. Having both SATA and PATA gives users more versatility when connecting their storage devices. There are many users who still have not made the movement towards SATA but when they do, the ability to use a SATA device will be present.

As we have seen in the past with many Gigabyte boards, the K8VNXP also comes with Gigabyte's DualBIOS feature. In the event that the BIOS does corrupt, you'll be happy to know that you won't have to send the board off or replace the BIOS chip manually. DualBIOS will recognize that the main BIOS has gone bad and will boot from the backup. From this point, users have the option to rewrite over the original BIOS with the good BIOS. It is not often that a BIOS goes bad but as the cliché goes, better safe than sorry.

Gigabyte's DPS K8 is a daughter card that changes the board's regular 3-phase power into a 6-phase circuit. Basically, this will ensure higher stability when the system is under stress, as when being overclocked. The system will run fine without the add in card but using it should theoretically makes the system run cooler, putting less stress on the other power components, provide cleaner power, and possibly prolong the life of the board. The fan cooling the card does light up although the chipset cooler does not.