Foxconn Winfast NF4SK8AA-8EKRS Motherboard Review - BIOS
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The motherboard booted up and posted without any headaches at all, so I headed into the BIOS. If you are familiar with another BIOS, you’ll find it easy to navigate and work with since everything is pretty standard. The user manual is also very helpful, and it describes all the BIOS features in case you have any questions.
When you start tweaking your settings and testing the overclocking features, you’ll become familiar with this BIOS Features screen.
All the features are Super! The top three are all nice. SuperBoot helps to start up considerably faster. It stores all the drive information when it intially boots up, then it skips the post sequence during later boots. Altogether it seems to save around 10 seconds of sitting around time. That doesn’t sound like much, but if you use hibernate shut down in windows, it gets your PC running almost immediately.
SuperBIOS-Protect is designed to keep your BIOS settings from being harmed by viruses. It uses a double BIOS system to keep from being terribly damaged. There’s no reason I can think of to leave it disabled. SuperRecovery helps to protect hard drive data and fend off viruses. I’m honestly not sure how it does this.
SuperSpeed is what you are looking for if you want to overclock. It lets you change the CPU frequency from 200 to 300 MHz, starting in intervals of .5 and then changing to intervals of 1. A maximum of 300 shows that this board is not for the extreme "balls-to-the-wall" overclockers, but it certainly overclocks sufficiently for any average system builder.
The CPU Clock Multiplier gives options for all the available multipliers of my 3500+. The CPU Vid Control gives options for the Vcore voltage. The Hypertransport Multiplier gives you settings from 1x to 5x.
The PCIE Frequncy can range from 100 to 145 MHz. The CPU Vcore Voltage allows you to set it from 20 to 140 mV. The VDIMM Voltage can go from 2.50 to 2.85 V. Overclocking memory to 3 V is obviously not possible here, but these setting are enough for a moderate memory overclock.
And the only other thing in the BIOS that you’ll probably be curious about is the integrated peripherals. Of course we have a RAID controller, SATA, onboard 8-channel audio, etc. You get the idea. That done, I rebooted, installed Windows XP SP2 without any issues and got ready to work with the drivers and included software.
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