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Foxconn Winfast NF4UK8AA-8EKRS Foxconn Winfast NF4UK8AA-8EKRS: Looking for an nForce 4 Ultra on the cheap? We look at an offering from Foxconn that offers all the features at a low price point.
Date: March 23, 2005
Manufacturer:
Written By:
Price:

Winfast is more known for their OEM work then they are amongst the enthusiast community. Winfast is more commonly known as Leadtek. Leadtek is of course the parent company to Winfast and is known through their series of video cards. Foxconn produces plastic products, connector products, and PC enclosures. Foxconn and Winfast have come together to start putting out motherboards. With these two companies together with the nForce 4 Ultra chipset and this board was born. Let's see what it has to offer.

CPU AMD Socket 939 FX/64
Chipset NVIDIA nForce4 (CK8-04) Ultra
Memory

- Dual channel, unbuffered, 2.5V DDR266/333/400

- (4) 184-pin DIMM sockets, max 4GB

Expansion Slots 1 x PCI Express x16, 2 x PCI Express x1, 4 x PCI

 

LAN Integrated Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000) MAC + PHY (Vitesse)
Audio Integrated, 7.1 channel AC97 (Realtek)

Box Contents & Board Layout

The Box is pretty generic and has nothing of value to note. It comes in a flat color as opposed to being glossy. Opening the box reveals a pile of cables and the all important instruction manual. Underneath the cardboard divider is the motherboard itself.

The packaged items that the NF4UK8AA-8EKRS comes with are plenty. From left to right it includes 2x IDE cables, 1x Floppy cable, rear mountable USB ports, the NvRaid drivers disk, 4x SATA cables (very impressive), backplate, drivers and utilities disk, and finally 2x Molex to SATA power cables.

The board comes fully packed with many parts all over it. Overall the layout is good. Here is a breakdown.

The CPU socket has the standard AMD recommended mounting bracket, and the area around the socket in the "no-mount zone" is clear of anything that could make installation of a larger heatsink more difficult. There is a row of capacitors to the left of the socket, but I didn't find them to be of any trouble. The heatsink fan header is located to the upper right of the socket, whereas the video card extra ATX12v plug is located to the lower left. I was easily able to install my Zalman 7700Cu so the largest of heatsinks should easily fit on this board.

The area around the ram is more or less clear of anything. The ATX24 pin connector is seen here which is on the upper right hand side of the motherboard (bottom of this picture). The ATX24 pin connector also supports a 20 pin connector. In the top left hand side of the picture the board model number is silked onto the motherboard, and in the middle "WinFast" is silked as well.

The bottom right hand section reveals the southbridge's active cooling, the four SATA connectors the two IDE connectors (bottom right in blue and white) and the one floppy connector (left). The BIOS reset jumper and battery are also seen here in the top left of the picture as well as the BIOS chip.

The expansion slots are plentiful featuring two 1x PCIE, one 16x PCIE, and four 32bit 2.3 PCI slots. In the bottom left hand side of the picture is the auxiliary PEX power connector. This is mainly for PXE support. It is very clear that this board does not have two 16x PCIE slots and it certainly does not support SLI (nor does it have the nForce 4 SLI chipset).

The rear ports are sparse by many enthusiast manufactures standards. From left to right it features the basic 2 PS/2 ports, printer port, serial port, SPDIF coaxial out, 1394 Firewire port, 2 USB ports, 10/100/1000MB Ethernet port with 2 additional USB ports, and finally the 8 channel sound ports which include rear, central, line in, line out, and microphone ports. My only real qualm is the lack of an additionally Ethernet port. While one is sufficient, two can come in handy for those not wanting to use a hub or switch to transfer files to one another while still being connected to the Internet (I am using a similar setup now).

The only real note that was troublesome with the design of the motherboard was how close the RAM slots are to the CPU socket and the location of the South Bridge (seen in picture). The problem with the RAM slots is that if a very larger cooler is installed dimm 1 and dimm 2 can both be inaccessible. However the manual does recommend that if only 2 dimm slots are to be populated for dual channel it highly recommends slot 3 and 4 to be populated first. That makes the closeness to the socket moot for many users whom only have two sticks of ram to begin with. As far as the South Bridge location, as is seen in the picture with a MSI 6600 GT installed in the PCIE x16 slot, it already begins to cover the South Bridge. If a longer card such as a 6800 Ultra or an x800 XT PE were to be installed it could potentially block even more airflow. However having the fan partially covered did not seem to effect performance during testing.

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