Foxconn Winfast NF4SK8AA-8EKRS Motherboard Review - Touring the Mainboard
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The motherboard is a nice bright orange, which can look very eye-catching through a case window. It definitely beats the days of green everything.
It seems to follow the basic nForce4 layout, as you’d expect. Unlike some other boards, the memory slots are nicely out of the way of things, not crowding any cable or running into long video cards.
Here’s a close up of the memory. The board will run four dual-channel memory sticks together, provided they are all the same speed. If you don't use dual-channel, you can add only two sticks of memory according to the installation specs.
Behind the memory, you’ll see the connectors for the power adapter, the floppy cable, and two ATA adapters for your IDE devices. They’re all positioned rather well. They're near your drives and power supply, and having them all together like this keeps them from being all spread over the board.
Moving a bit to the left on the motherboard, we come to the processor chipset. Of course it’s fit perfectly for stock AMD heatsinks. It looks pretty open for other coolers, though there are some capacitors that stick up a little bit (on the left) that might cause trouble if your HSF is very wide and pretty low to the motherboard. Otherwise, it looks ready for most coolers.
Above are the front panel and SATA RAID connectors. The two SATA connectors can be configured in RAID 0 or RAID 1. When trying these out, the SATA cables snap right into place and feel secure. There are also 4 standard SATA connectors above the battery (which you can see on the overhead shot at the top of the page). They are positioned very well to be near your hard drives.
To the right of the RAID connectors, you can see the holographic Pheonix BIOS. We’ll see the important BIOS stuff later, when the computer is turned on.
The bottom row features three blue USB connectors. Many cases will use two of these for front USB ports, and you can plug the included USB case slot into the final one. Considering the 4 USB plugs that are standard on the rear of the motherboard, this probably gives you more USB than you need. But Foxconn has done a great job preparing the board for however people want to use it.
The set of black pins on the bottom right is for the front panel. As it is on most motherboards, you need to check the manual to see where to plug the case’s front panel connectors in. I really appreciate the few boards that label where connectors go on the board, but it’s not something I’ve come to expect. One thing I couldn’t find, oddly, is a PC speaker connector.
Moving over to the PCI-Express area, you can see there are two PCIe x16 expansion slots with a space between. There is enough space to run video cards that occupy 2 slots in SLI. Between the two is your PCIe x1 and an SLI chip. It looks like running cards in SLI will require turning that card around and plugging it in.
Above the video slots, you can see a four-pin power plug for accessory power. Below them, you can see a couple of the regular PCI slots. You get 3 PCI slots on the board, which is really quite good. A lot of less expensive boards shipping now only have 2.
Here are the back connectors. Obviously, we get the PS/2 keyboard and mouse, a parallel and serial port, SPDIF ports, dual gigabyte Ethernet adapters on top of four USB 2.0 adapters, and 8 channel audio on the far right. The dual Ethernet and 7.1 audio already onboard is a really nice addition to the onboard features.
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