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Gigabyte K8NSC

AMD Athlon 64 socket 939
NForce 3 250Gb
AGP / PCI

Overall Score: 85 points



Looking for motherboards for the Athlon 64 is easy. But what's not so easy is if you want to use your old AGP graphics card with the new motherboard and you don't want to spend money more than you have to. Face it, AGP graphics cards are on the way out, so investing in something that will become obsolete in a year is not the greatest idea. Thankfully there's the Gigabyte K8NSC, an AMD Athlon 64 motherboard with AGP that won't break your wallet. While it's not a full featured motherboard, the price is right and you still have the same performance and technology available on PCI Express boards.

Overview

The full specification (taken from Gigabyte's website)

Processor
Chipset
Integrated peripherals
Memory
Internal I/O Connectors
Expansion Slots
Rear Panel I/O
CPU/AGP/DIMM setting
Power
Form Factor
H/W Monitoring
BIOS
Other Features
There are several interesting and not-so-interesting about this board. First things first, the good news

S-ATA and IDE RAID

Since it's uses the NForce 3 250 Gb chipset, K8NSC retains the features found in this chipset. The K8NSC is equipped with both S-ATA and IDE RAID. Instead of buying two S-ATA drives, you could just buy another IDE drive identical to the one you have and use them both in a RAID IDE array. Now you have increased storage performance without spending more than you have to for 2 S-ATA drives.

Expansions and Add-Ons

As peripherals go, K8NSC can fulfill some of your needs. By default, there's 4 USB ports and Gigabit LAN. For legacy purposes, there's still PS/2 connectors for your mouse and keyboard, 2 COM / serial ports and 1 LPT / printer port. The K8NSC uses the standard AC97 codec from Avance Logic, so sound quality is good enough for watching movies and listening to music.

Like most socket 939 AGP equipped boards, the K8NSC comes with 1 AGP slot and 5 PCI slots. All socket 939 boards, whether PCI Express or AGP / PCI, comes with 4 DIMM slots for DDR memory modules and the K8NSC is no exception. If you're using old, PCI dinosaurs add-on cards that have some compatibility problems with Plug n Play, you can set a slot to exclusively use a certain IRQ and of course set the PCI Timer as low or as high as you like.

Tweaking and Overclocking Friendly

For those who want manual adjustment settings, many overclocking and tweaking options are available. These hidden settings can be accessed by pressing 'Ctrl' and 'F1' key at the same time on the main BIOS menu. Processor, AGP, chipset, memory voltage settings can be automatically set or manually adjusted. You can also set the multiplier for your processor and adjust the FSB. The obligatory memory timing adjustments are also available and quite a lot too. On the PC Health menu, you can view statistics such as voltages, fan speeds and temperatures.

Since NForce3 is a single chip design, you only have one chip for both northbridge and southbridge. This chip is actively cooled on the K8NSC, so there shouldn't be any stability issues due to heat. While the position of the chipset with the fan / heatsink seems worrisome, it's not - the height is just enough so it won't obstruct full length AGP and PCI add-on cards.

Gigabyte uses color coding to great effect, most of the connectors and headers are colored - only the audio in headers are not. This should make installation easier. If you're a long time supporter of Gigabyte, you'll be happy to know that they now supply jumper headers for clearing the CMOS - no more contact points!

There are minor gripes with this board. But they are minor and if you can live with them, you have a really good board on your hands. The bad news:

Performance

The K8NSC is a good, affordable board. The lack of features is understandable since it allows them to sell K8NSC at a lower cost. During testing, we encounter no problems what so ever with this board. One note on performance: the K8NSC defaults to a FSB of 201 MHz by default. Choosing 200 MHz doesn't make much difference and the 1 MHz is quite normal, so we're using it for testing.

Before looking at the test results, we encourage you to read our 'How We Evaluate' article so you understand how we conduct our test and benchmarks. More importantly, you will also see how each benchmarks react with our test setup. We only put the average, minimum and maximum fps in this evaluation to keep it brief.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 'Newcastle' socket 939
2 x 256 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro AGP 8x
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
450 watts ATX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 5.4 reference driver
VIA Hyperion 4-in-1 4.56 reference driver
Realtek ALC 658 Driver WDM 5.630 (motherboard supplied driver)
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

Why we've chosen this setup:

AGP motherboards and graphics cards are on the way out, replaced by their respective PCI Express variants. Even gamers and users using existing AGP boards will eventually upgrade to PCI Express motherboards. For the most part, the main reason they haven't is because of the graphics card. There are faster AGP graphics card than the Radeon 9700 Pro such as the GeForce 6800 and Radeon X800 series, or even the mainstream parts such as GeForce 6600 and Radeon X700 series. But ask yourselves this question: Why buy the AGP variants now, since we're all eventually going to upgrade to PCI Express? Gamers still using AGP cards will either buy mainstream cards (6600 and X700 series) or older high end cards (5900 and 9700/9800 series). Why the Radeon 9700 Pro? Well, this old card is still pretty powerful and it can be bought for around US $ 125, compared to the average US $ 200 for GeForce 6600 GTs. Remember, that we're targeting mainstream users here and they don't want to spend more money than they have to on a setup that's going to be obsolete within a year. That's why we've chosen this setup, since we feel it reflects the market for this product more accurately. Of course, we will be using a different setup for testing high end cards and PCI Express motherboards.

The results:

Dungeon Siege
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
6
93.43
496.47
.
6
110.28
506.8
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

Don't let the minimum fps fool you: that minimum 6 fps happens on mid-level loads. Gameplay wise, we rarely go down beyond 30 fps and that happens mostly in the last parts of the benchmarks. So overall, we get very solid average fps of 110.28 fps and minimum 30 fps in Dungeon Siege. Clearly the K8NSC gives fluid gameplay experience you can expect from the Athlon 64 3000+.

Splinter Cell - Tbilisi 1
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
24.60
49.25
108.50
.
24.52
49.08
104.87
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

In Splinter Cell, we get a minimum 24.52 fps and a 49.08 fps average fps, similar to what we expect from this kind of setup. Still playable and the minimum fps doesn't interfere with gameplay in anyway. The K8NSC loses some fps in the lightest part of the demo, but that's hardly noticeable.

Call of Duty - Dawnville
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
18
120.1
269
.
18
117.1
265
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

Removing the 80 fps cap in Call of Duty nets us an average fps of 117.1 fps, more or less. The minimum 18 fps happens at the very beginning of the benchmark, where data is still being loaded. Throughout gameplay, we get minimum frame rates of 45 fps,

Lock-On: Modern Air Combat
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
16
52.47
154
.
15
53.85
156
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

The second heaviest system benchmarks we use, Lock On, gave results of minimum 15 fps and an average 53.85 fps. Like in Splinter Cell, we see a slight variation between platforms of different chipsets. The K8NSC edges a bit ahead, but again nothing really noticeable during gameplay.

F1 Career Challenge
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
56
82.80
101
.
55
81.34
100
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

Even on F1 Challenge which is very bandwidth sensitive, there's not much difference between the two. A minimum 55 fps and an average 81.34 fps is very acceptable, proving both system offers fluid gameplay with this game.

Nascar Season 2003
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
43
61.87
108
.
41
58.77
101
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

Nascar 2003 Season benchmark give us a minimum of 41 fps and an average of 58.77 fps. Lower, but not very significant and hardly noticeable during gameplay (3 fps from around a 60 fps average). That's because the difference is on the higher fps, you could see there's a 7 fps difference between the two system's maximum fps.

Full Spectrum Warrior
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
37
50.37
74
.
37
50.35
74
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

Full Spectrum Warrior gives us a minimum 37 fps and an average 50.35. Again we see the lack of any significant fps differences between chipsets and motherboards with the Athlon 64 system.

Rome Total War
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
15
22.49
29
.
16
21.14
29
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

Finally, the heaviest system benchmark, Rome Total War, gives us around 16 to 17 minimum fps and an average 21.14 fps. Same thing here, although the fps is lower for all systems. 1 or 2 fps at most, but that's expected with this benchmark.

Conclusion:

If you want an AGP Athlon 64 platform that is as fast as PCI Express, but you still want to use AGP graphics cards and don't want to pay for a pricey board, Gigabyte K8NSC is it. You can expect the same performance and the stability you expect from Gigabyte with the K8NSC. The lack of features is understandable, but the most important ones are there: Gigabit LAN and sound. As an extra, the K8NSC lets you use IDE hard drives in a RAID array configuration, so you can use it to max out the performance of your hard drives.

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