Doom 3 - Timedemo 1 @ 640x480, no vsync, no autoexec.cfg settings

There was a much greater improvement from the mild overclock in Doom3. However the clock speed of the CPU matters much less then the video card at higher settings.

Unreal Tournament 2004 - Max Detail @ 640x480, AS-Convoy

Unreal Tournament shows a lot of improvement from overclocking on the three different bot matches. However Unreal Tournament like Doom 3 depends much more on the video card then the processor at higher speeds.

3DMark 2001SE

Breaking the 20k mark after the mild overclock and then a little more. Showing that increasing the FSB just by a little bit will drastically increase overall system performance in certain applications due to the 5x HT in addition to the overclock.

Aquamark

The GFX score actually went down when overclocking the processor (7512 to 7482). I suppose this shows that the scoring system with Aquamark isn't perfect. There is a definite increase in overall score however.

Overclocking

Well if by now you didn't notice the fact that I topped out at 223FSB which by any enthusiast standard for a motherboard is low, that's all I could come up with for this board. Any attempt to increase voltage, lower HT, ram timings or play with the very limited ram divider did not allow any higher increase in overclock. One thing to note however is that while overclocking in this limited fashion the board when reaching it's limited would lock up (for instance at 224 FSB) but at 223 it was rock solid and performed well. The mild overclock did boost numbers throughout the tests but not by a very large degree.

Without the ability to change the multiplier this board is very not overclocking friendly. However there is another method to do just that through a little program called . With ClockGen I could decrease the multiplier and increase the front side bus effectively putting out more power. At 4x HT I could easily get 255fsb and decreasing it further allowed for a bit more room. However I didn't want to mislead anyone reading this article thinking that it was overclocking friendly by including those benchmark tests in this article. In reality this sort of software should be implemented in the hardware. Through a BIOS update Winfast could easily allow multiplier adjustment if they wanted to.

Conclusions

Winfast's NF4UK8AA-8EKRS completed all tests with out any hiccups or bumps along the way and there is a lot to be said for a board that can do that. That said this board does not have SLI and it certainly wasn't able to overclock like an enthusiast board so enthusiasts should look else where.

This board is priced significantly cheaper however than many other nForce 4 boards, somewhere in the region of as compared to many boards with SLI that cost at least $60 more. The stability while running it is very good too, and at stock speeds compares decently well with other nForce4 solutions and would be a good board for those whom don't overclock, and are not interested in investing in SLI It would also be good for those whom might be interested in using it for an in house server or other solutions requiring stability.

The board doesn't come with any fancy software, but personally I don't use most of the bundled software anyway, and the NvRaid drivers disk and the drivers CD is more than enough to get the system started. It comes with 4 SATA cables which help out a lot as well as power cables for the SATA drives and of course the standard IDE cables. I would choose to have this cable bundle over most software bundles that a lot of manufacturers are shipping with their products. Winfast is slowly trying to cater to more enthusiasts and it is getting better at doing that, as they did add a host of voltage and FSB options, but just lacking that crucial multiplier adjustment.

Whether or not they will try to step up and venture into the territory that ABIT, ASUS, MSI, and DFI are trying to make for themselves is yet to be seen. There is a long way to go before they reach that much ground, but this board with a few more BIOS tweaks is a good start and most of that can be fixed by a few simple BIOS updates.

Pros
Stable
Inexpensive
Nice cable bundle

Cons
Single NIC
Mediocre overclocker
No Multiplier Adjustment

Bottom Line: Overall, we found the Foxconn Winfast NF4UK8AA-8EKRS a solid, yet unspectacular offering. For those who simply want a motherboard that is reasonably priced, stable and just plain works, this is a great choice. Those who live on the edge may be disappointed by the lack of enthusiasts features.

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