Overclocker Cafe - Foxconn WinFast NF4SK8AA Mainboard

Foxconn WinFast NF4SK8AA SLI Mainboard

Performance

As we always do, we are going to do a head to head comparison with a comparable board to give you some perspective on our performance results that you can 'take home with you.' The comparison board we have today is a recently reviewed AMD K8 SLI board from Albatron, likewise styled the Albatron K8SLI. Testing will consist of a mix of productivity and gaming benchmarks of popular and practical applications to gauge the board's real world performance.

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

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 another suite of office apps but it 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, no real performance differences between the two boards. Using SiSoft Sandra 2005 Pro's Memory Bandwidth benchmark, let's take a look at how well the NF4SK8AA handles memory bandwidth. Series1 corresponds to the Sandra Int ALU score while Series2 corresponds with the Float FPU score.

BACK NEXT

Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - Features / The Board
Pg 3 - A Closer Look at the Board
Pg 4 - BIOS
Pg 5 - Test Setup / Productivity Benchmarks
Pg 6 - Gaming Benchmarks / SLI
Pg 7 - Overclocking / Conclusion