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Foxconn Winfast NFPIK8AA-8KERS They Created a Monster ....
(Review by MS, Oct 16, 2005)

Foxconn is one of the world's largest OEM manufacturers of computer parts and only recently has started to enter the enthusiast market. Overall, the brand appears to be well-received, even though the naming conventions are somewhat counterintuitive. Enthusiast boards on one side, OEM boards on the other side, there is still ground to play and it appears as if the red tape was lifted at least for once to let the engineers and designers play their hearts out. The result is a true oddity in the conformistic world of motherboards - a dual chipset motherboard for a single - server class - CPU with two 16-lanes PCIe SLI slots that promise to deliver uncompromised bandwidth to the graphics adapters while in the background some super RAID configuration is on a rampage and the entire system talks to the intranet via dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Needless to say that the latter are protected by nVidia's own Firewall.

All of this could be nice and dandy but often enough, we have been dealing with hardware that looks great at first sight and then turns out to be a dog. To make a long story short, such worries turned out to be unfounded, on the contrary, the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS we were dealing with had a few other surprises for us with a few huge D'UH effects that left us marvelling why we have not seen the same features elsewhere - so simple were they. There is only so much we can say in two short paragraphs, but it sure might be worth reading the rest of this review.

Once in a blue moon, there is some hardware that brings the thrill of the new and uncharted to a reviewer. Of course, there are the usual product releases that are anticipated by the product briefings and so on and by the time we see the actual hardware, a lot of the initial excitement has already faded. This does not mean that there won't be a rush of adrenaline when a new SLI system is powered up, the same goes for any of the new dual core processors and even a new memory DIMM can turn into an exciting piece of hardware. But that is not what we are going to talk about here today.

An Opteron 875 will work in the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS as will any other Socket 940 processor, with or without dual core technology.

Once in awhile, there is the proverbial uncut diamond at the bottom of a cracker jack box, the unexpected, the thing that comes out of nowhere in a drab box and materializes only after a somewhat reluctant installation of the hardware. Something that has specs that are controversial to begin with and where it is hard to beat some sense into what the engineers might have thought when they conceived the blueprint. And yet, there it is, pure, raw and full of unexpected features that translate into power, supremacy, or just a beautiful concept study - everybody has his or her own preferences. And then, it is called something like NFPIK8AA-8EKRS, try to say that one 3 times in a row.

Behind the somewhat uninspiring moniker is Foxconn's latest and most daring project, a dual processor server platform stripped off the second CPU interface but with all other goodness that anybody could and should expect from an SMP platform. And SMP can be done anyway, simply by using a dual core CPU as available from both Intel and AMD at the time. Suffice it to say that it will be hard to shove an LGA 775 Intel P4 into a Socket 940, ergo, one is stuck in this particular case with an AMD processor, either one older Athlon64 FX or else an Opteron class processor.

Let's get down to the technical details:

As we wrote in our review of the ASUS K8N-DL, the monolithic nForce4 Professional chipset comes in two distinct flavors, namely the nForce4 Professional 2200 and the nForce4 Professional 2050. In short, the main difference is that the 2200 is the full version whereas the 2050 version is a stripped-down version where mostly some of the advanced South Bridge features have been omitted. That is, whereas the 2200 chipset features a legacy 32-bit PCI daughter bus, an integrated 10 port USB controller and the LPC bus necessary to support the legacy parallel port, the 2050 chip offers basic functionality by supporting PCIe, SATA/PATA RAID and Ethernet. On the PCIe front, the 2200 allows for flexible configuration of the 20 lanes available, whereas the 2050 is fixed in a 16,1,1,1,1 configuration.

Because of the somewhat more limited feature set of the 2050 core logic chip, it is primarily used in an expansion role, meaning that in case more interfaces for either PCI Express or else chipset level-integrated SATA-RAID connections are needed, the 2050 IC can provide the extra features. The operative word in this case is "chipset level-integrated". A more common practice of integrating additional connectivity is to use a third party controller for e.g. the SATA RAID interface, examples like the SiliconImage 3114 or the Promise PDC controller series come to mind immediately. Designs like those, however, are inherently limited by their binding to the PCI bus, some newer solutions are interfacing with a PCIe lane but in general, the issue is that none of the controllers is really sitting on the backbone of the connectivity bus. This is where a chipset level-integration can make a significant difference, especially in RAID solutions that with the latest generation of fast drives could easily run into speed-matching conditions.

The solution, as so often, is rather simple, if one chipset only offers 1/2 of the desired tie-ins, then doubling the chipset may provide the adequate number of interfaces without sacrificing performance. Needless to say that it is hard to conceive effective use of two audio solutions, so scratch that one, also, if there is a preferred configuration of the expansion lanes, use that one in a fixed scheme and save the extra money for where it counts, that is, the quality of other components. Whoever followed this train of thought up to here, can probably envision a motherboard with a dual chipset as that used in some of the server-class system boards offered by e.g. Tyan in a 2 or 4-way processor configuration.

This still leaves out those end-users that are content with a single processor but want the full feature set described above. This is where NFPIK8AA-8EKRS could become a household name - at least, if there were any way to actually pronounce it.....[neufpikateuh]

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