Foxconn WinFast NF4K8AC nForce4 Mainboard 

The Board

The standard golden brown PCB measuring 245 x 305mm, immediately shows lots of working room without the crowding of capacitors or connection points.  The CPU socket is reasonably clear and does not look to have any problems with its wanting to accept an aftermarket cooler.  The AUX Power connector is placed by the socket corner farthest from you in the second shot below.  Its placement also does not appear to be too close to inhibit any aftermarket coolers or make a mess of your cable routing. 

     

To the right of the socket area are four DIMM slots supporting DDR400 in dual channel mode up to a gig stick of RAM in each.  Several nForce4 boards have opted for a perpendicular mounting of the DIMMS in relation to the board’s length.  Personally, I prefer the vertical positioning of the DIMMS to the right of the socket for the sake of a clean look in a windowed case. 

  

Still on the pictures above, notice the friendly layout Foxconn has employed.  The 24 pin ATX power plug, IDE, SATA and panel connectors are lined nicely along the length of the edge of the Foxconn NF4K8AC.  On the bottom edge you can see the FDD connection with a three pin fan header on either side.

The chipset cooler is a small actively cooled aluminum sink sporting a clear acrylic 40mm fan.  Here we find the only problems with the NF4K8AC.  With a standard sized PCI-Express card installed, the edge of the PCI-E card overhangs the chipset cooler.  This in itself is no big deal but you can forget about installing an aftermarket cooler here because of this overhang.  The other problem is more with the fan header placement of the board itself.  You have three fan headers on the PCB.  The first is at the top of the board just next to the tip of DIMM 1, the second and third are on the bottom edge of the NF4K8AC as we already noted.  Stretching the chipset's fan power line to the bottom of the board is not going to upset anyone but having one of the headers immediately next to the chipset area would have given Foxconn an A+ on layout.  Unfortunately they didn't. 

     

Here we find the PCI-E/PCI slots.  Nothing really interesting here until you notice the four pin Molex plug on the bottom left corner.  I'm sure there's a reason for its being here but I'm also sure I have no clue what that reason is.  This isn't the power hungry SLI model of the nForce4 line.

One last look at the Foxconn's physical presence.  Here are the I/O ports we listed out in the specs nicely laid out and easily accessible.

 

BACK                    NEXT

Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - Features / What you get
Pg 3 - The Board
Pg 4 - BIOS
Pg 5 - Setup and Productivity Benchmarks
Pg 6 - Gaming Benchmarks
Pg 7 - Overclocking and Conclusion