Nvidia has finally joined forces with Intel to provide Nforce chipset support for its processors. The first result of this new agreement is the Nforce4 (Intel Edition) chipset.

Gigabyte has wasted no time in implementing this in the form of the GA-8N-SLI Royal ­ the latest model in its new i-DNA (Intelligent dual-nano architecture) series of boards.

The board supports Socket 775 Intel processors with 533, 800 and 1066MHz FSB speeds and backs this up with four Dimm slots supporting a maximum of 4GB of DDR2 533 or 667MHz memory.

The Nforce4 (Intel Edition) chipset also supports dual-channel asymmetric memory, so you get dual-channel performance even if you populate three Dimm slots.

The Nforce4 (Intel Edition) chipset has both a northbridge and southbridge. Both are passively cooled, but Gigabyte supplies a cooler for the northbridge, if you want to push the board when overclocking.

Unlike the current crop of Intel-based boards, Gigabyte has built two ATA controllers on the GA-8N-SLI Royal, so you can use four ATA devices without resorting to any of the four Sata II ports.

Two further Sata II ports and a single ATA port are controlled by a Promise Raid controller. You also get dual Gigabit Lan, 7.1 audio and dual Bios chips.
Gigabyte’s GA-8N-SLI Royal shows the combination of an Nvidia chipset and Intel CPU works and works well.

For full performance results click here, or go to The Test Bed and click on Performance results to compare it against other motherboards.