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While I imagine that nVidia hoped that its reintroduction of SLi would make a big splash in the computer world, I don’t think it could have predicted the rash of copycat products that have appeared in its wake. There are now motherboards from several manufacturers offering two x16 PCI Express slots, whether or not the board actually supports SLi. Gigabyte is the latest company to take this route, by launching a two graphics card slot board based on the Intel 915P chipset called the GA-8I915P Dual Graphic.

If you know your chipsets, you’re likely to be aware that the 915P chipset only supports 16 PCI Express lanes via the Memory Controller Hub (MCH). A further four lanes are provided via the Intel Controller Hub 6 (ICH6), but this is not suitable for high bandwidth usage for things such as graphics cards due to the type of interconnect between the ICH and the MCH that Intel has chosen.

However, Gigabyte has deemed it fast enough to be used with current graphics cards and it does indeed work quite well with two graphics cards fitted, up to a point. In a way this solution is similar to VIAs DualGFX, although it won’t be able to offer the same amount of bandwidth to the second card.

But before I go in to more details of what can be done with two graphics cards, let’s take a closer look at the board. Apart from the obvious two x16 PCI Express slots, the board also has a further x1 PCI Express slot and three standard PCI slots. The GA-8I915P Dual Graphic is not a top of the range board from Gigabyte and the easiest way to spot this is the fairly modest feature set.

As Intel’s ICH6R only supports two EIDE drives, a VIA EIDE RAID controller is fitted that adds support for a further four drives. These can be set up in RAID 0, 1, 0+1 or JBOD (Just A Bunch Of Disks) configuration. The ICH6R adds support for four SATA drives and these can be configured as RAID 0 or 1. Due to the nature of the two x16 slots, the Marvell Gigabit Ethernet controller is located on the PCI bus. This means that it won’t be able to perform as well as a PCI Express controller would have been able to.

Add FireWire and 7.1-channel audio and this board has all the bases covered. The FireWire connectors – one four pin and one six pin - are fitted to a bracket shared with two USB 2 ports. A further two brackets with two USB 2 ports on each also comes in the box.

There are discrete outputs for all of the 7.1 audio channels as well as a line-in and a microphone port around the back. Gigabyte has also fitted two coaxial S/PDIF connectors, one for input and one for output. The remaining ports that make up the I/O panel are two PS/2 ports, a serial and a parallel port and four USB 2.0 ports.

There are four memory slots on the board and in an unusual move, Gigabyte has decided that the GA-8I915P Duo should support both DDR and DDR2 memory. While this means that you can initially save costs by keeping your existing DDR memory when you upgrade motherboard, the two types can’t be mixed, so you’d have to dispense with your old memory when you upgrade.

You also get Gigabyte's trademark feature - Dual BIOS – which gives you a spare BIOS chip on the board in case the main one should fail due to a BIOS upgrade going wrong. The chipset is passively cooled, and although there is a header for a chipset fan, none was supplied in the box. Apart from the CPU fan header, there are only two other free headers, which is quite stingy on a board that is likely to run hot, especially if used with two graphics cards.

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