Introduction

The new Gigabyte GA-8GPNXP Duo is one of the very first Grantsdale motherboard to reach our lab. It came packed inside a huge box which contained quite a number of accessories that you would have come to expect of a Gigabyte product. The package itself is two times the thickness of a typical motherboard box and we won't blame you if you have mistakenly thought there are actually two motherboards inside.

The Gigabyte GA-8GPNXP Duo is one of Gigabyte's top-end product targeted at the power user who wants nothing but everything. When we mean everything, we really mean that there's actually not a single feature missing in the board. You name it, they have it. It's sort of a product where one would purchase along with the standard components (e.g. CPU, hard disk drive, memory, graphics card) and have little need to think about what else is missing. Gigabyte has covered all grounds, you just need to worry about installing the basic stuff.

The unusually large motherboard box packaging.

The 'Duo' suffix given to this motherboard indicates its support for two types of memory. Yes, that's right, if you can't afford new DDR2 memory, the GA-8GPNXP Duo lets you reuse your old DDR400 memory as well. This gives the board added flexibility especially when DDR2 memory is still so difficult to find in the market, not to mention that the cost of DDR2 could get you double the DDR memory capacity.

Inside the package, you'll find the following items :-

The Gigabyte GA-8GPNXP Duo motherboard

Two-port USB 2.0 bracket

USB 2.0 and Firewire bracket (2x USB 2.0, 1x 9-pin Firewire and 1x 6-pin Firewire)

Two SATA cables

One Ultra ATA-100 IDE cable

One Floppy disk drive cable

One 4-pin Molex power to 2x SATA power converter

Rear ATX I/O panel

Driver and Utilities CD

Motherboard user manual

GigaRAID user manual

GN-WPKG 802.11b/g Wireless LAN PCI card (with driver CD, antenna and half-height PCI bracket)

U-Plus DPS card (with metal brace)

Cool-Plus north bridge fan

An interesting addition to all of these would be Gigabyte's innovative use of its packaging material. The cardboard box used to hold the motherboard can be simply converted into a makeshift testbed for those who wants to quickly set the board running without a proper chassis. This would definitely appeal power users who usually want to test products on a temporary platform, and the box from this packaging does the job elegantly.

The box packaging that can be transformed into a mini testing platform. Note all the perforated openings which you can use to put devices like a FDD and CD-ROM drive.

Instructions are provided on the box.