The BIOS is probably one of the top 10 reasons someone would build their own PC instead of buying it off of an assembly line. The assembly line PC's are fixed; you get what you get, with minimal ability to modify performance. WinFast uses the AWARD (Phoenix) BIOS, which has been their staple since they entered the motherboard market space.
The AWARD BIOS is where many of the user level tweaks can be done in order to improve performance or stability. Our board used the 1.2 version of the BIOS, which is not the current available BIOS at time of writing. I loaded the WinFast Super Utility and had it check for a BIOS update. Sure enough, there was a newer version, lucky for me and for you :). I proceeded to update the BIOS from within Windows XP. I can happily say that everything went as it should, I rebooted and the system was now running with version 1.7 BIOS at the base.
Pressing the DEL key allows us to access the BIOS upon boot. The Main Menu is something that we commonly see in the AWARD BIOS arena, let's take a look under the hood shall we.
Moving to Standard CMOS Features we see a relatively common screen as well. Our Drives and removable media devices are displayed to ensure they are connected and identified properly.
Moving to the BIOS Feature menu we notice a few things unique to WinFast. SuperBoot allows the BIOS to maintain system relevant information, therefore performing a faster boot up. This is not a good thing if you frequently change hardware however. SuperBIOS-Protect disables the ability of a write function on your BIOS. This is to protect it from viruses such as CIH. SuperRecovery is not fully explained within the manual. It appears it is some sort of data protection and HDD recovery function. This sets the hotkey for such an action. SuperSpeed allows us to increment the PCIe bus as well as the CPU Frequency. However, noticeably missing is the ability to increment the VCore.
The Advanced BIOS Features page allows us to choose boot priority as well as some other BIOS functions. Unique to what I have seen previous is the ability to set a priority for which CD-ROM I want to boot from, not just a CD-ROM.
The Advanced Chipset Features menu allows us to modify our DRAM configuration as well as some spread spectrum settings. Spread Spectrum is used to significantly reduce the amount of EMI interference from the motherboard. This is helpful if you are still using a CRT and it sits close to your Case. We can also set Thermal-Throttling of the CPU on this page, this allows for reduction of heat in a hot environment where you don't want the machine to shutdown. I see many applications for this ability.
Integrated Peripherals is just that, your IDE, RAID, USB, AC97, LAN etc setup. Remember, if you enable RAID, you are going to need to build the WinXP/2000/2003 server with the included floppy nVidia RAID Driver.
There are more BIOS options that we won't get into here, these are basic BIOS settings that are either fairly common or require basic common sense to properly configure. Which actually means, leave them at stock settings.
Overclocking
As with the Foxconn predecessor, overclocking is not the strong suite of the WinFast NF4K8MC. There is the ability to clock the processor at 1MHz increments above stock though, which is very nice. There is even a setting to allow you to overclock the PCIe bus and get a little more out of your graphics solution. However, there is no setting to allow you to increase VCore, severely limiting you on the amount of overclock you can obtain. The maximum I was able to achieve was a modest 210MHz for POST, to perform and complete an actual test, I had to back it down to a very poor 205MHz, which results in a net 1.85GHz CPU on the AMD Athlon64 3000+.
Granted a mATX is not typically looked at as unlimited overclocking headroom material. I would, however, expect more than 50MHz.
Testing
Test Machine: WinFast NF4K8MC mATX Motherboard, OCZ PowerStream 420, 1GB Kingston HyperX PC-4700, AMD Athlon64 3000+, HIS X850XT IceQ II Turbo, Hitachi Deskstar 80GB 8MB buffer 7200 RPM SATA Drive, Zalman Theater 6 Headphones, Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 5.3
Comparison Machine: Asus P5GDC Deluxe ATX, OCZ PowerStream 420, 1GB OCZ, PC2-5400 Platinum, Intel Pentium 4 520 (2.8GHz 800FSB), Asus N5900 Extreme 128MB, Hitachi Deskstar 80GB 8MB buffer 7200 RPM SATA Drive, Zalman Theater 6 Headphones, Windows XP SP2, Detonator 71.84
Since both of these machines are very different, the Asus P5GDC numbers are included as a reference only.
Test software will be:
- Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds, using the 32-bit 2004 version.
- Sysmark 2004 is BAPCo's latest revision of the mainstream office productivity and Internet content creation benchmark used to characterize the performance of the business client. It uses a number of real-world applications and runs them through a series of tests. We tested with the office and content creation benchmarks.
- We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.
- We used an Animatrix file, titled The Second Renaissance Part 1, and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes, seconds, and lower is better.
Unreal Tournament 2004 - run at 640x480 with minimal detail to test CPU/Subsystem performance.
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