Gigabyte's GA-8AENXP-D Mainboard
| Gigabyte GA-8AENXP-D | |
| CPU Support | All LGA775 processors, except the new 8xx series. |
| Northbridge | Intel i925XE |
| Memory Support | 6 slots. 6 x DDR-II (4GB max) |
| AGP | None |
| PEG | 16X from i925XE |
| Southbridge | Intel ICH6/R |
| Audio | Realtek ALC880 HD Audio CODEC from ICH6/R feed |
| Audio Connectivity | 8 port backplane analogue speaker, coax S/PDIF input and output |
| PCI Conventional | 2 x 32-bit 33MHz PCI 2.3 slots |
| PCI Express | 3 x 1X slots |
| IDE | 1 ATA133 compliant port from ICH6/R |
| IDE RAID | None |
| SATA | 4 ports from ICH6/R, 4 ports from Silicon Image Sil3114 |
| SATA RAID | All 8 ports. RAID levels 0, 0+1, 1, JBOD from both controllers |
| Networking | Marven Yukon 88E8001, 32-bit PCI, 10/100/1000Mibit per second Broadcom BCM5751KFB, PCI Express 1X, 10/100/1000Mibit per secondM Gigabyte GN-WPKG IEEE802.11b/g Wireless networking card, 32-bit PCI, 54Mibit per second |
| USB | ICH6/R feeding 4 x backplane USB2.0, 2 I/O USB2.0 Cypress CY7C65640 USB2.0 Hub Controller feeding 2 I/O USB2.0 ports |
| FireWire | Texas Instruments TSB82AA2 FireWire800 Controller feeding 2 I/O ports via TSB81BA3 bus arbiter |
| Other I/O | PS/2, Parallel, 1 x Serial, floppy |
Did sir want a feature packed mainboard? Did you, sir? Oooh! Suits you, sir! Gigabyte's i925XE not only gives you six DDR2 slots where other boards give you just four, for increased flexibility in your memory upgrade strategy (although speed is reduced if you fill all six), but also provides three networking devices that include 54Mibit/sec WiFi and PCI Express 1X-based Gigabit Ethernet. If that's not enough for sir, there's also eight, count 'em, SerialATA ports for connecting disk devices.
A lone ATA port lets you connect an optical device or two if you wish, or indeed a hard disk if you're still running ATA hardware. Need to poke eight USB2.0 webcams into the board? No problem. Got any FireWire800? There's a pair of ports for them, too.
And if that's not enough, you've got 7.1 positional audio support from a Realtek ALC880 and support for pretty much every LGA775 under the sun, barring the new dual-core models that'll show up in due course. Feeling spendy? You could slide a 570J, 3.73 or 3.46XEs and even a 660 into the socket without a problem, the Giga taking the lot.
Purely a power user's board, offering up the feature set that befits such a product with hopefully the performance to match. However, features and performance are nothing without the basics of a solid layout, so let's have a close look.
