The nForce4 for the Pentium4 platform is picking up speed with most manufacturers already having their products announced. Today we take a look at Gigabyte’s implementation of this chipset with their 8N-SLI Royal motherboard which is their second model in their new “Royal” range of motherboards with iDNA technology.

Packaging

The 8N-SLI Royal comes packaged nicely in a green box with cut-outs to reveal the included Bluetooth USB dongle and DPS module. You can flip the cover open to see some of the Gigabyte specific features that the board supports along with a picture of the motherboard while the back side shows the chipset features.

Inside the packaging, Gigabyte bundles quite a few cables and back plates along with a quickstart guide and user manuals. Gigabyte includes their awesome SATA cables that lock onto the board and drives making them almost impossible to snap out accidentally. Since the board supports SLI, an SLI bridge is also included in the package.

Layout

The 8N-SLI can easily be recognized as a Gigabyte motherboard as they tend to have a similar layout which is not a bad thing. Starting off, the CPU socket is a bit close to the Northbridge but you shouldn’t have any problems fitting in the stock or a slightly larger than stock HSF unit. To the right of the CPU socket, you can find the memory sockets as well as the main power connector and floppy/IDE connectors- just where we like them. The 12V power connector is located below the CPU socket which is a less than ideal position for it as we prefer this connector to be on the top of the board.

Both the Northbridge and the Southbridge are passively cooled which is good for people who like a silent setup, however, in our tests both the Northbridge and the Southbridge got very hot. This has happened on all other nF4/P4 boards we’ve tested so we’re not sure if passive cooling is a good idea on nForce4 motherboards. The bottom edge of the board has all the headers for SATA, USB and Firewire. An additional IDE port is also present which, along with two of the SATA ports, is powered by a Promise RAID controller.

Being an SLI board, you can find two PCI-E slots that accept video cards along with two PCI-E x1 slots and two 32-bit PCI slots. Gigabyte places a molex connector next to the first PCI-E slot for additional power to the Video card- if needed. We think this is a good idea as earlier AMD/nF4 SLI systems weren’t very stable with our 350W PSU and we had to upgrade for a more stable solution.