A smattering of chips
Although the nForce3 Ultra is a single-chip design, the GA-K8NSNXP-939 is also peppered with a wide assortment of auxiliary chips to power the board's integrated peripherals.


The nForce3 Ultra is the brains behind this operation, though. With a 1GHz/16-bit HyperTransport processor link, AGP/PCI lock, and support for both Serial and "parallel" ATA RAID, the nForce3 Ultra chipset is packed to the gills with goodies. Sadly, though, the GA-K8NSNXP-939 doesn't take advantage of a couple of the nForce3 Ultra's more notable features.

First, Gigabyte has gone with a PCI-based Silicon Image Sil 3512 Serial ATA RAID controller to augment the GA-K8NSNXP-939's SATA RAID capabilities instead of milking all four of the nForce3 Ultra's Serial ATA ports. Tapping all four of the nForce3 Ultra's SATA ports requires a couple of PHY chips, but users would be able to span RAID arrays across up to four Serial ATA drives. Given how well NVIDIA's RAID implementation scales up to four drives, it's really a shame that Gigabyte isn't taking full advantage of the nForce3 Ultra's SATA RAID potential.

Not that the Sil3512 is a horrible SATA RAID chip; it just can't do four-drive arrays on the GA-K8NSNXP-939. The Sil3512 also sits on the PCI bus, so it has to share 133MB/sec of bandwidth with other PCI devices, including the board's Firewire and Gigabit Ethernet chips.



That's right, this board has PCI-bound Gigabit Ethernet. Half of the GA-K8NSNXP-939's networking duties are handled by Marvell's 88E8001 GigE chip. The other half are tackled by the nForce3 Ultra's integrated Gigabit MAC, which would be great were it not for Gigabyte's puzzling decision to pair the nForce3 Ultra's Gigabit MAC with a 10/100 Fast Ethernet PHY. The move caps the nForce3 Ultra's otherwise speedy integrated GigE controller at 100Mbps—an order of magnitude slower than it should be.


Handicapping the nForce3 Ultra's integrated GigE controller is bizarre, but at least it doesn't cripple NVIDIA's firewall. You can read more about the firewall, which is bundled with NVIDIA's ForceWare drivers, here.

Moving to audio, it's NVIDIA's turn to take a little heat. Because NVIDIA left the SoundStorm APU out of its nForce3 chipsets, a decision that drew the ire of many enthusiasts, the GA-K8NSNXP-939 is stuck without hardware-accelerated 3D audio solution. Realtek's ALC850 codec handles digital-to-analog signal conversions, serving up eight channels of audio at resolutions up to 16 bits and sampling rates up to 48kHz.

Hardly anyone integrates Firewire capabilities into chipsets these days, so Gigabyte uses Texas Instruments' TSB82AA2 Firewire controller to serve the board's three Firewire ports. The TSB82AA2 joins the Silicon Image RAID controller and Marvell GigE chip on what amounts to a very crowded PCI bus.

Two chips that won't crowd the GA-K8NSNXP-939's PCI bus are the board's dual BIOS chips.


DualBIOS keeps a handy backup BIOS waiting in the wings should the board's primary BIOS fail to flash properly or otherwise become corrupted. If the primary BIOS fails a checksum on boot, the board will boot from the backup BIOS and you can fix things from there. Nifty, huh? Gigabyte also supplies software to allow users to easily flash the board's BIOS from Windows, which will be handy for less savvy users.