GIGABYTE "GA-K8N Ultra-9

[gate1975mlm]

I am looking for a review of the GIGABYTE "GA-K8N Ultra-9. Anyone have this board?

 

[tmchow]

I wouldn't midn seeing a review either.. i'm particularly interested because it's an Ultra board, non-SLI and has passively cooled chipset. Seems perfect for my HTPC.

 

[Trente]

The following link contains a review on the SLI version of the board, but other than this added feature, the board is identical to the K8N Ultra-9:

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/gak8nultrasli/index.html

tmchow, check out page 4 that deals with the passive cooling...

 

[tmchow]

Originally posted by: Trente
The following link contains a review on the SLI version of the board, but other than this added feature, the board is identical to the K8N Ultra-9:

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/gak8nultrasli/index.html

tmchow, check out page 4 that deals with the passive cooling...

Thanks for the link!

This is what is mentioned in the review about passive cooling:

One of the initial frustrations we had with the Gigabyte board were errors and lock ups from various applications. Memory tests and alternate sticks of memory proved to be no avail and there is only a single BIOS revision at this time. After some hours of frustration and troubleshooting, we found that the passive heatsink on the nForce 4 chip was to blame. Although the heatsink was hot to the touch, the MCP was still overheating, causing system instability. Taking the heatsink off, cleaning it (along with the chip), and applying some Arctic Silver 3 fixed all stability issues. The thermal interface pad just wasn't doing its job too well.

While this was a simple fix, it was not one that should have been required in the first place. Quite frankly, I'm surprised that something like this passed Quality Assurance. Anyway, back to the results.

Woah..Rather scary if you ask me.. But I guess it's easily remedied.