The System

The complete system (once it was all put together) for this test was:
Foxconn NF4SLI7AA-8EKRS2 motherboard
Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz LGA775
2 x 512MB OCZ PC2 6400
HIS X800XL
Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 sound
ASUS Dual layer DVDRW
Lite ON DVDR
2 x WD 74GB Raptor
1 60GB Maxtor
Cooler Master Real Power PSU
All kept cool with the Swiftech H20-APEX "Extreme Duty" water cooling kit.

Comparison System:
ECS PF21 Extreme motherboard
Intel P4 550 3.4GHz
1GB Patriot DDR2
HIS X800XL
2 x WD 74GB raptor HDD
Lite On DVD burner
Lite ON DVD ROM
Cooler Master RealPower 550 PSU.

Benchmarks and system testing:

All benchmarking and system testing was done at default setting, no overclocking was done for any of the benchmarks. Software used for testing will include.

- We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds, using the 32-bit 2005 version.

- The ZD Winstone suite is a script that runs a series of actions and calculates a final score that measures a PC's overall performance. Higher numbers are better.

- 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.

- Blue October- Argue With a Tree CD1 was ripped into one .wav file. We then encoded that .wav file into a 320Kb/s sample rate MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Doom 3 , FarCry, UT2K4 @ 640x480, LQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. These results are real-world, and higher scores are better.

All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed. For comparison of similar systems take a look at some of our other benchmarks that can be found here.

In the CPU arithmetic benchmarks neither board dominates the other, and these results are pretty much on par with similar boards we have tested.

The SiSoft multimedia benchmark demonstrates how the CPU handles multi media instructions and data, the higher the score the better. The nForce 4 Foxconn board shows a significant improvement over the ECS board.

In The memory bandwidth test the Foxconn board crushed the ECS, one thing I would like to point out though is the Foxconn board was using much faster RAM, it was underclocked to match the speeds of the RAM used in the ECS board but also had a lot more headroom due to the underclock.

As mentioned before, the gaming benchmark was ran at 600 X 400 on low detail, benchmarks were ran three times each and scores averaged to provide the results. The UT2K4 score may seem low, that is the score from as-convoy which always scores significantly lower than other maps.

Business Winstone 2004
Business Winstone tests using "real world" applications like Microsoft Excel, FrontPage etc. In this test the higher the score the better, benchmark was ran three times and the score is the average.

	Score
Foxconn	24.4
ECS	22.1

The Foxconn board scores a bit better than what we have seen from other similar boards

PiFast is used for a number crunching benchmark, in this case the lower the score the better.

	Time
Foxconn	47.20
ECS	48.34

Again we see the Foxconn board slightly on top which has been the case in all but the CPU arithmetic benchmarks. So far the Foxconn NF4SLI7AA-8EKRS2 is proving to be an excellent "all around" board scoring well in the business Winstone tests shows it's an excellent choice for a work environment, the gaming tests show it's also suitable for the gamer

Network Performance:

Network performance tests will be limited to 10/100 due to not having the equipment to test gigabit. I ran two tests, the first test was transferring a single large file (2GB Mandrake DVD ISO) from the Foxconn based PC to my file server in the basement and then back again. Both PC's are hardwired via Cat5 and connect to a Dlink DI 624 router. The second test was copying a folder of mixed size files (414 files of varying sizes totaling 533MB) to the same file server. DU meter was used to monitor traffic and windows task manager used to monitor CPU load.

Single Large File 2GB

	Time	Speed	CPU Load
Upload	4m 29s	8.11mB/s	7-33%
Download	4m 42s	7.43mB/s	3-48%

Small File test 533MB total

	Time	Speed	CPU Load
Upload	1m 32s	4.52 -8.12mB/s	4-22%
Download	1m 25s	7.42	3-18%

There was a lot of variation in the small file upload test, each new file dropped the speed down to around 4.5mB/s then would pick back up.

Overclocking:

If the amount of tweaking options in the BIOS is any indication of this boards overclockability we should be able to push this board pretty hard. I'm no expert overclocker so don't take my results to be the best or worst this board can do, simply use the results as an example and then judge for yourself.

Default speed of the tested CPU is 3.4GHz (200X17) By adjusting FSB speeds only, no timing adjustments, no voltage modifications I was able to reach 4.1GHz (242X17) At higher speeds it failed to boot and I eventually ended up corrupting my hard drive so I stopped trying. Again I'm a novice overclocker and tend to play it safe so I don't delve to deeply into the other overclocking options. There's no doubt in my mind that if a novice like me can easily obtain a 700MHz overclock that a more experienced overclocker could push it much further with the features provided with this board.

Final Thoughts and conclusion

I started off this review not knowing a whole lot about Foxconn, but very interested in seeing how this board would perform after reading some of the reviews of their other products. Performance wise this board is solid and feature packed, the options in the BIOS for fine tuning should make even the most hardcore of overclocking enthusiast happy, yet even with the over abundance of features it is still user friendly enough for a novice like myself to do some pretty impressive overclocking.

Pros: Excellent performer, Tons of overclocking and fine tuning features, stable, SLI, Dual Gbit NIC, rounded cables and plenty of SATA cables for all of the SATA ports provided.

Cons: Capacitors may interfere with some heatsinks (mostly waterblocks) as well as some longer video cards, location of 4 pin ATX plug and 4 pin Molex plug, would be nice to see these on the outside edge of the board.

Bottom Line: Foxconn has doven headfirst into the shark infested waters of the mainstream market and proven they can swim with the big boys. Pleasing the hardware enthusiast crowd is no easy task, but Foxconn has put their years of manufacturing experience to good use and put together a winner with this board. Even a hardcore enthusiast will have a hard time finding fault with this board.

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