Gigabyte offers cheap SLI motherboards

The introduction of 6600LE, which is little else than SLI-enabled 6200, and the reduction of Nforce4-SLI chipset price are silent witnesses that Nvidia wants to grab as much market share as possible before the arrival of illusive competing solution.

Also, bear in mind that even the newly introduced channel-only deal, X800GT isn't Crossfire "compatible", while the Nvidia's channel-answer, 6800XT is SLI-enabled, just like basically - every GeForce 6 and 7 PCIe product. Bear in mind that even 6600 and 6200 work in pair with no physical SLI-bridge, but are around 15-20% slower than bridged parts.

Now, things are starting to heat up with two products for mainstream users. Gigabyte launched the GA-K8NPro-SLI (Chimpzilla) and GA-8N-SLI Pro (Chipzilla), geared towards users who do not want to spend $200 or even more for the SLI-enabled motherboard. The goal, said the company, is to offer affordable SLI solutions, and the pricing is right on target.

GA-K8NPro-SLI sells for around $110 in the US and around €104 in Ol' mother Europe.

At the same time, GA-8N-SLI Pro sells for $140 in North America and around €118 in €uropa.

Both motherboards are plain-vanilla variants of their more expensive sisters, easily detectable by just looking at the empty silk traces on the PCB.

Both AMD and Intel boards feature a single LAN (nF4 GbE) and four S-ATA-II slots with no external RAID controllers, two physical x16 and two x1 slots. Auto-SLI detection isn't present, since Gigabyte opted for a SO-DIMM switch card.

Cost cutting didn't include power-circuitry, because both boards feature MCZ capacitors made by Rubycon. The chipset is passively cooled on both motherboards. µ