Overclocker Cafe - Foxconn WinFast NF4K8AC Mainboard

Foxconn WinFast NF4K8AC nForce4 Mainboard

Performance

Any benchmark you see on a system has to be accepted in the context it is presented in. No two systems are the same and results can vary widely depending on what components you have running in your rig. In order to give you some perspective on our testing results, we are going to use our Chaintech Zenith VNF4 Ultra K8 board as a comparison product. The VNF4 Ultra is of course an nForce4 Ultra based board however with our using it in some of our other nForce4 based board reviews as a comparison product you can more easily extrapolate results from one review to another.

Our suite of benchmarks includes PC Magazine's Business Winstone 2004, PC Magazine's Content Creation 2004, SiSoft Sandra 2005 Pro's Memory Bandwidth Benchmark, Half Life 2, Doom 3 and Far Cry. All our graphed figures are the result of five runs per benchmark per product. Out of these five, the highest and lowest scores are thrown out with the remaining three averaged and graphed as follows.

Test Bed

AMD Athlon 64 3000+

OEM Cooler

Albatron GeForce 6600GT

(2) 512 mb DIMM of Corsair XMS4400 DDR

Maxtor 80gb SATA HDD

Generic DVD-RW drive

Ultra X-Connect 500w PSU

Windows XP Pro with all service packs installed

Results

Let's start things off with the productivity benchmarks. First up is PC Magazine's Business Winstone 2004. Business Winstone 2004 runs a suite of many popular office programs, measuring their speed and generating an overall score. The programs it uses are Microsoft Access 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft FrontPage 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Project 2002, Microsoft Word 2002, Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003 and WinZip 8.1.

PC Magazine's Content Creation 2004 is also a suite of office apps but focuses more on design and creativity. The programs run to generate a final score as shown below are Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0.1, Adobe® Premiere® 6.50, Macromedia® Director MX 9.0, Macromedia® Dreamweaver MX 6.1, Microsoft® Windows Media™ Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980, NewTek's LightWave® 3D 7.5b and Steinberg™ WaveLab™ 4.0f.

So far there hasn't been any significant differences between our budget oriented Foxconn nForce4 board and our comparison board from a performance standpoint. Let's see how well it handles its memory transfer. Using SiSoft Sandra 2005 Pro's Memory Bandwidth benchmark, let's take a look at how well the K8SLI handles it memory bandwidth. Of the nForce4 boards we've seen so far here in the shop the Chaintech has been the one to beat in the memory bandwidth department. Let's see how the Foxconn fares.

Here we find our first real performance differences. Rather than look at this as indicative that the Foxconn NF4K8AC is lacking here I'm going to have to say that the Chaintech Zenith VNF4 Ultra board is particularity strong. As you may recall from a recent nForce4 review with an Albatron SLI board, we saw a similar difference in scores favoring the nForce4 Ultra based product.

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