Our recent work on RF magnetron sputtered silicon nitride films has been extended to include the effects of gold electrodes on the electrical conductivity. The sandwich structure films were RF sputtered from a silicon nitride target at a power of 100 W using NZ as the sputtering gas. In agreement with the results for samples with Al electrodes, the capacitance was independent of the applied voltage, indicating that Schottky barriers were absent at the interfaces and that Au provided an ohmic contact to the silicon nitride films. Measurements of capacitance as a function of inverse thickness showed a geometric variation, with a relative permittivity value of 6.8, slightly higher than in the case of Al electrodes. When DC voltages exceeding approximately 2 V were applied, there was a decrease in the current and the establishment of differential negative resistance behaviour. This is typical of electroforming, a process which is known to appear in thin film insulators having certain noble metal electrodes. At low voltages, Ohm's law was obeyed, followed by a field lowering process, with coefficient beta similar to 1.95 X 10(5) V m(1/2) = V-1/2. This was identified with Poole-Frenkel emission rather than the Schottky effect, since the electrodes were ohmic contacts. Such behaviour was in contrast to that observed in sputtered silicon nitride films with Al electrodes, which showed space-charge limited conductivity but had similarities to results for ion beam synthesised silicon nitride films, where the measured field lowering coefficient was also smaller than the theoretical value.