GigaByte GA-8N-SLI Royal     

     When nVidia acquired 3Dfx all those years ago, a lot of us old hat gamers collectively said "There goes the neighborhood". In its era, the 3dFX Voodoo cards were the crème of the crop. Some poor marketing strategy led to the ultimate demise of 3dFX and seemingly with it, the ability to combine two graphics cards to increase the ever-important frame rate. nVidia has resurrected SLI technology and now it's available for both AMD and INTEL platforms. The technology has grown more robust with greater CPU and GPU power and with PCI Express, bandwidth isn't the bottleneck anymore.

     By now, the awesome capabilities of the nForce 4 chipset are yesterdays conversation. But exactly what it brings to the Intel platform is what I hope to uncover in this review. There are a slew of features that make this quite an attractive path for the Intel crowd, even if they don't' intend to utilize the SLI capabilities of the motherboard. For starters, if you're one of the many folks that enjoy running multiple displays, this is just one of many avenues that can put 4 monitors at your disposal. The whole host of modern day verbiage is here as well. DDR2, LGA775 and SERIAL ATA II all join in to make the nFORCE 4 SLI INTEL EDITION motherboard a gamers paradise.

    The GA-8N-SLI Royal is GigaByte's flagship nForce4 SLI Intel Edition Chipset motherboard. Bundled with useful accessories and featuring the Royal series standard "Universal Dual Power System", the GA-8N-SLI Royal is targeting the high-end enthusiast market.