Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9

Zitat

The board performs on par (and better in most cases) compared to the more expensive Asus A8N-SLI nForce4 motherboard. Of course, when one takes advantage of the SLI functionality of the Asus platform, you have the potential for much greater performance compared to the Gigabyte platform, but that also requires a pair of expensive graphics cards. If SLI isn’t your cup of tea; and you only need a single PCI Express graphics slot to use with your new Athlon64 processor, the Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 is certainly a board worth looking into.

For a board ranging in the $150 price range, we were happy with the feature set Gigabyte provided. Firewire, GigE, quad-port SATA RAID with a hardware Firewall, all the basics are covered here. The board lacks some of the frills seen on other high-end gaming boards like Dual LAN and a second SATA RAID controller, but than again, only a small percentage of gamers out there actually utilize features like this. We’re glad they didn’t include their fairly useless features like Dual BIOS and their Dual Power System, as these only tend to drive up costs and aren’t incredibly useful for the end user. The K8NF-9 is simple and effective, and flat out works.