Thoughts

The K8NS Pro felt every inch the solid Gigabyte mainboard that they're famous for. It didn't miss a beat during testing, BIOS operation was flawless and stability was excellent. After that, and given that the ASUS K8N-E is just as good at those things, it's the feature set that determines what you purchase for your Athlon 64 CPU these days, with performance being so derivative and tied to the CPU itself.

For me, choosing the K8NS Pro lies on how much ATA devices you want to attach to the board. It offers more ATA-based flexibility than the ASUS K8N-E, keeping almost every other comparable feature the same, so if SATA isn't really your bag yet (and why should it be if you have a nice investment in big ATA disks and maybe a couple of optical burners), the K8NS Pro is a fine mainboard.

However, if SATA is your bag, the ASUS K8N-E is a better nForce3 250 + Socket 754 choice, especially since it uses the 250Gb variant.

In isolation, Gigabyte couldn't have done much more to the board to make it better. The layout is 95% there, the performance is fine and the feature set is appealing. It all depends on the system you'll build around it.

The upsides definitely outweight the downsides with the K8NS Pro. Recommended.