Product News - Gigabyte Announces Flagship Motherboards

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Arriving fresh and sparkling in the TrustedReviews offices this morning was a box of goodies from Gigabyte. First up, enclosed in funky gatefold style packaging was the GA-8ANXP-D. This is the new top-of-range motherboard from the flagship 8-Sigma series. The GA-8ANXP-D motherboard is based on the Intel 925X chipset, and supports the new Socket-T LGA775 Pentium 4 processors. Accompanying it was an nVidia GeForceFX 5900 card - notable for being the first retail graphics card we’ve seen using the new PCI Express interface. With these primed and ready for testing in our lab you can look forward to a full review in the not too distant future.

From the looks of things the board is ‘dual’ themed. First, the 925X chipset supports dual-channel memory delivering a maximum bandwidth of 8.5GB/sec from 533MHz DDR2 RAM.

Next is the rather unique Gigabyte Universal Plus Dual Power System (U-Plus D.P.S.). This unusual looking add-in card contains an eight-phase power circuit and is designed to withstand varying electrical current levels. Then there are the two integrated Gigabit LAN connectors, and finally there’s the classic Gigabyte Dual-BIOS. One could even continue with the Wi-Fi PCI card included in the box, which supports both 11Mbits/sec 802.11b and the faster 54Mbits/sec 802.11g standard.

Also included is a PCI-Express x16 slot, the full eight-channel version of Intel’s High Definition Audio, and an IEEE 1394b FireWire connector operating at 800Mbits/sec - twice the speed of the standard port.

With so many features it’s no surprise that the GA-8ANXP-D will be expensive with the suggested retail price set at £178.60 inc VAT.

Also available in the 8-Sigma series is the GA-8GPNXP Duo utilising the Intel 915P chipset offering support for both DDR1 and DDR2. For more information you can visit the Gigabyte web site at www.gigabyte.com.tw.