Intel Motherboards: Something Wicked This Way Comes...

Final Words

The Gigabyte 8N SLI Quad Royal is an excellent and very unique product offering. This board will more than satisfy most Intel enthusiasts and is an excellent companion for the Intel Pentium D processor series. In fact, NVIDIA has solved their dual core compatibility issues, which allowed this board to shine as a general usage workstation with the unique advantage of offering up to 10 display output.

We have to commend the engineering effort behind this board and applaud the results. While it is exciting that Quad SLI is available from a hardware perspective, it is disappointing that driver level support from NVIDIA is currently not available; although, we are sure that NVIDIA is aware of this. This should not detract prospective users of this board as it offers a world of potential for someone wanting multiple display output utilizing the latest in video technology, or simply a home user needing a board that will satisfy multiple uses.

Although the board that we received was a pre-production sample and utilized an engineering BIOS, it performed as well or better than most boards currently in production. In fact, the stability offered by the Gigabyte 8N SLI Quad Royal was impressive to say the least as it did not crash once during the entire testing phase and recovered beautifully from zealous overclocking testing. With that said, let's move on to our opinions on this board.

In the video area, if you're an Intel gamer looking for SLI, or a workstation user/business owner/video creation fanatic looking for numerous display outputs, then this is the board for you. The variety and potential methods of display options are unparalleled in the general market today. It fully supports NVIDIA SLI with two approved NVIDIA based video cards in full x16 operation. If you utilize the new 81.84 drivers, you can now match like GPU cores from different video card suppliers among other benefits.

In the on-board audio area, this board offers the standard AC97 setup utilizing the familiar Realtek ALC850. While this solution is acceptable for office applications and Internet Tetris, it does not match the HD Audio on-board solutions of the other nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition boards. While serious gamers and audiophiles will certainly want an add-in solution, it is not acceptable for a board of this caliber to be utilizing this codec, considering the alternatives available now.

In the storage area, this board offers the standard plethora of options available from the nForce4 SLI Chipset along with class leading performance. However, as with other Gigabyte Royal boards, we certainly wish the Firewire 800 (TI-1394b) option was available considering the video centric design of this board.

In the performance area, this board was at or constantly near the top in most categories. The board is very balanced and will happily run the same benchmarks at its full overclock configuration as well as it does at stock settings. We believe that the performance will only improve as the board enters the production phase.

I think that Mr. Dark would look at the 10 display output of this board and believe his magic created such a wonder when, in reality, it was the belief of a small group of engineers who wanted to win the day that brought this excellent board to market.