The Gigabyte K8NS pro is a high end board, which includes IDE and SATA RAID, Gigabit ethernet, and the nForce 250 chipset.

This board feels like it is designed for the workstation market, with support for four SATA drives and eight IDE devices but very much fits the enthusiast also. In addition to the normal channels supplied by the chipset, the K8NS pro has a GigaRAID IT812 chip and an Sil3512, providing RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring) on two pairs of SATA drives, and RAID 0, 1, and 0+1 (striping and mirroring) over four ATA133 drives. One unique feature to Gigabyte is the twin BIOS facility, which can really help in a bad flash scenario.

The K8NS is well laid out, with most of the connectors towards the edges of the board. The power connectors are at the top left and top right hand sides of the board and do not get in the way of the CPU fan at all. The primary SATA connectors are located just above the AGP slot, which could prove inconvenient, as the cables will obstruct access to the graphics card, but there is sufficient clearance between the AGP slot and DIMM slots to enable you to change RAM without moving the graphics card. All the sundry headers for firewire, USB, etc, are neatly lined up along the bottom edge of the board.

Gigabyte have gone for a simple look for this board, with the board in blue, offset by lime green IDE and AGP slots, with a gold anodised chipset cooler, which has an effective finger guard on top. The fan-cooled chipset is not strictly necessary, in fact, it is the only board in the round up with active cooling, but it keeps the chip stone cold, so may help a little with overclocking.

The K8NS Pro has the full range of overclocking options in the BIOS, bar a PCI frequency lock. This is annoying, considering the chipset supports it. Maybe this will be added in with a BIOS update.

The board includes a comprehensive 90-page manual, in English only. There is a separate 88-page booklet on the IDE RAID functions, and a 32-page booklet for the SATA raid. The documentation is well written, and thorough.

At £82.18, this board offers excellent value for money, rivalled only by the MSI K8T. This board does have considerably better overclocking facilities, more IDE channels and has the only fan cooled north bridge. If you must have everything, you must have this board.

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