The nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset didn't come close to matching the commercial success of its cousin, nForce4 SLI for AMD64 CPUs. Part of the reason for this is that enthusiasts tend to prefer Athlon 64 over Pentium 4, but it didn't help that Nvidia's chipset for Intel CPUs was a lacklustre performer and poor overclocker.
Unfortunately, even after a year of BIOS and driver updates, the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset still fails to impress. The two high-speed PCI-E slots are so close together that it will be very difficult to use water cooling or fit Arctic Cooling VGA Silencers to the graphics cards. This means you'll have to put up with stock cooling, which will be incredibly noisy, especially in SLI.
In all other respects, the NI8-SLI GR is a very standard nForce4 SLI Intel Edition motherboard. It supports 8-channel AC97 audio, courtesy of a Realtek ALC850 chip, four RAID-capable S-ATA II ports and two RAID-capable EIDE channels. There are two PCI and two 1x PCI-E slots available for further upgrades, such as a Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card, although you may want to add an extra network card, as the NI8-SLI GR has only one LAN port.
The BIOS of the NI8-SLI GR provides more options than any other nForce4 SLI Intel Edition motherboard, but it's still a poor overclocker. Even though our test CPU, a 3GHz Pentium D 830, will overclock to 3.83GHz with a 255MHz FSB, the maximum stable FSB of the NI8-SLI GR is a mere 215MHz, which boosted the CPU frequency to 3.23GHz. This compares very poorly with the other LGA775 motherboards, which, with the exception of the Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI, are all much more overclockable. A useful widget is the two-digit LED next to the PCI slots that displays the motherboard's status when it's powering up. This can be useful for figuring out what's wrong if the system fails to POST.
As overclocking a Pentium 4 or Pentium D is practically mandatory these days, to equal the performance of an Athlon 64 or Athlon 64 X2, the Abit NI8-SLI GR really isn't a good choice. If you must have an Intel-based SLI PC then the cheaper Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI is a better buy.
Author: James Gorbold
Abit NI8-SLI GR