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Foxconn Winfast NFPIK8AA Motherboard Review

Author: Dennis Garcia

Foxconn Winfast NFPIK8AA (Dual nForce Pro Chipsets)
Opteron 148 1Meg L2 Cache 940Pin
Alpha PAL8150A
2x Patriot PC3200 Low Latency (PDC1G3200ERLLK) ECC/Registered 512Megs
2x Chaintech SE6600G GeForce 6600GT PCI Express
IBM Hitachi Deskstar 80gig SerialATA 7200RPM
Antec NeoPower 480 power supply
12x/40x DVD/CDRom
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1

DFI Infinity nF4 Ultra (nVidia nForce4 Ultra)
Athlon64 3200+ 512KB L2 Cache 939pin
Alpha PAL8150A
2x Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR500 512megs
Chaintech SE6600G GeForce 6600GT PCI Express
IBM Hitachi Deskstar 80gig SerialATA 7200RPM
Antec NeoPower 480 power supply
12x/40x DVD/CDRom
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1

Sandra is a software collection of synthetic benchmarks that will give us a basic idea as to what a system is capable of. It should be noted that SiSoft numbers change depending on what version you have installed, these were recorded using Sandra Professional Version 2004.10.9.133

Cachemem is a synthetic benchmark used to test bandwidth and latency.

The Sandra and Cachemem scores tell a strange story. With the NFPIK8AA we have a 200Mhz performance gain over the control system which should reflect positively across the board and does so in the CPU and Multimeda category. However when it comes to memory performance the slower nForce 4 Ultra system pulls ahead. The baffling part is that from a timing standpoint Patriot memory has the upper hand over the relaxed Crucial Tracer sticks.

It would seem the extra registered memory cycle does downgrade performance, at least from a bandwidth standpoint.