Product Reviews

If you've been thinking about upgrading your machine recently, the advent of the Athlon 64 FX-51 CPU is the perfect excuse. But the FX-51's Socket 940 and novel architecture, in particular the lack of front side bus, necessitate a new motherboard.

A point to remember when upgrading from a standard desktop system based on either Intel or previous-generation AMD processors is that the memory controller integrated into the FX-51 needs registered RAM, which is quite hard to come by and expensive, although prices are likely to come down as a direct result of the FX-51.

Both of these boards are built around nVidia's nForce3 Pro 150 chipset. Peripherals-wise, integrated onto the Gigabyte are two network adaptors - one Gigabit, one 10/100 - two serial ports, two USB 2, a parallel connector and 3.5mm analog audio jacks. The Asus lacks the Gigabit networking and serial port, but has four USB and one full-sized FireWire port.

The connector story doesn't end there, though, with extra ports aplenty. The Gigabyte has no less than four, the first with S/PDIF optical and co-axial plus analog surround audio outputs, the second with full-sized FireWire and FireWire 800 connectors plus two USB ports, another with just two USB ports, and the fourth with external Serial ATA connectors plus a power passthrough. The Asus' external connections are more sparse - one backplate with one full-sized FireWire port, one serial port, two more USB connectors and the last optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs. Both

If you're looking to build a quiet system, the K8NNXP isn't for you, with a fan-cooled heatsink on the nForce3 chip. There's another on the board's DPS (dual power system) daughterboard too: this adds another three-phase power regulator, increasing its maximum current handling capability and, in theory, the system's stability and reliability. It strikes us as odd to include it as a removable daughterboard, but it allows you to have one less fan in the system. The SK8N has no such trickery, and the nForce3 chip is cooled by a passive heatsink. Asus also has better CPU fan speed control, allowing fan voltage and hence speed to be set for three configurable CPU temperature thresholds. Gigabyte's system only has two fixed speeds with a threshold of 40C.

Inside, the Asus avoids the common problem of having the DIMM sockets next to the AGP slot, making it impossible to add or remove RAM without taking out the card; the Gigabyte is guilty of this. Asus also places the four-pin 12V power connector next to the ATX power block connector; the Gigabyte's two power connectors are on opposite sides of the board.

Like most boards, these two now offer comprehensive BIOS options, with full options for setting memory, AGP and CPU voltages and CPU clock and memory frequencies. For protection against BIOS corruption, the Gigabyte has the DualBIOS system, which means that corruption of one is automatically detected and the other is flashed across. Asus' Crash-Free BIOS 2 is less convenient, as the BIOS needs to be reflashed from disk.

There's little difference in the 3D benchmark tests, but the Gigabyte trumps the Asus in the application benchmarks, with an overall score of 2.68 against the Asus' 2.59.

Both boards are fine pieces of engineering. The Asus performs well and the passive cooling makes it better for quiet computing, but given their near-identical prices the Gigabyte, with its better feature set and extra speed, wins overall.