Verdict: Cheap and a good overclocker, but poorly designed

Gigabyte manufactures a huge range of different motherboards, often with far too many AoBVs (Accessories of Dubious Value), such as eight S-ATA II ports and external VRM daughterboards. Fortunately, though, the GA-K8N Pro-SLI is a much more streamlined motherboard.

The GA-K8N Pro-SLI is based on the standard nForce4 SLI chipset, which means it has two 8x PCI-E slots, although one slot can be configured to run with the full 16 lanes if you don't have SLI. Unfortunately, the two high-speed PCI-E slots are only separated by one of the two 1x PCI-E slots, and you also have to manually flip an SO-DIMM card when you want to enable or disable SLI - most motherboards now allow you to do this in the BIOS.

A Realtek ALC850 chip provides 8-channel AC97 surround sound, but there are two PCI slots free if you want to add a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi. There are ten USB 2 ports and three FireWire ports, plus four RAID-capable S-ATA II ports and two-RAID capable EIDE channels. However, the component layout isn't that great. If you have a particularly long graphics card, such as any GeForce 7-series card, then the rear of its PCB will overlap with the chipset HSF; this means that heat will transfer from the chipset into the rear of the graphics card, precisely where the voltage circuitry usually sits. Long graphics cards will also obstruct the S-ATA II ports.

The GA-K8N Pro-SLI defaults to a Command Rate of 2T with our Corsair memory, which limits its out-of-the-box performance. However, the overclocking options in the BIOS are decent, with up to 1.75V available for the CPU, while the RAM and chipset can be overvolted by 0.2V and 0.3V respectively. We overclocked our test CPU, an Athlon 64 X2 4200+, to a 240MHz FSB, and by reducing its multiplier, the GA-K8N Pro-SLI also benchmarked stably with a 320MHz FSB. This is a good overclock for a sub-£100 nForce4 SLI-based board.

The GA-K8N Pro-SLI is a good choice if you want a low-cost board that overclocks well, but for less ardent overclockers, the Asus A8N-SLI SE is a better choice, as its PCB layout is superior and it costs only £1 more.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

• AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition - Processors
• Shuttle XPC SX48P2 Deluxe - Desktop PCs
• SilverStone Raven - Peripherals
• Raptor Gaming M3 Platinum - Peripherals
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 - Processors
• ATI Radeon HD 4670 - Graphics cards
• DFI Lanparty JR P45-T2RS - Motherboards