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| Foxconn Winfast NFPIK8AA-8KERS They Created a Monster .... | |
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(Review by MS, Oct 16, 2005) |
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Foxconn NFPIK8AA-8EKRS |
Layout
At first glance, the layout of the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS appears rather conservative, the CPU socket is the dominating structure in the upper half, flanked on the left by the memory expansion slots. Keep in mind that the Opteron class of CPU, or by extension, any Socket 940 processor, requires Registered ECC memory, non-registered (or unbuffered) modules won't cut it here. The first hint that there may be something unusual going on is the presence of two coolers in the lower half of the board, namely on the two instances of nForce4 Professional chipset as explained above. Other commitments to a server class / workstation caliber of the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS become rather obvious as soon as one tries to plug in a standard 20-pin ATX power connector - the socket found on the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS is of the 24-pin "EPS" variety that may work with 20 supply lines but we would highly recommend using the correct power configuration.
Voltage Regulator Module
Usually, a board's reliability and stability stands and falls with the power supplied to the CPU by the on-board voltage regulator module. In most cases, we see splitting of the supply power into three phases offset by 120 degrees to minimize the ripple current caused by the switching frequency. In the beginning of the Athlon Slot A generation, we saw a few high-end quad phase solutions based on e.g. the Semtech SC1144 controller. Similarly, ABIT based an entire marketing campaign on the four power phases of the BH7 but cost reduction and improvements in the controller designs have led to pretty much ubiquity of three phases - along with the necessary capacitors. Looking at the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS, we see another sign of concession to server class requirements, the return of the quad phase VRM! Gotta love it!
Heart of the VRM is the Semtech 2643VX controller, coupled with four SC1211S driver chips that interface with the individual MOSFETs. The 2643 controller is one of the most recent designs, developed specifically with Intel's VRM 10 specs and AMD's Opteron requirements, featuring support for up to 4 phases, 6 bit programmability (64 steps; in the "K8" implementation 25 mV steps) with a maximum Vre support of 2.8V, temperature compensation and everything else that is current state of the art in CPU power deliverance. Suffice it to say that four phases are better than three for the simple fact that they allow faster switching frequencies and lower ripple currents
Expandability
In terms of expandability, the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS offers two of the standard single lane PCIe slots (500 MB/sec*), supplemented by one 4 x slot (2GB/sec bandwidth*) and two 16 x slots (8GB/sec*). In contrast to the solution found on most SLI boards, the 16-lanes slots are true, independent 16 lanes each, meaning that in SLI mode no less than 16 GB/sec bandwidth is available as opposed to the 8 GB/sec used in the split solutions elsewhere. At this point, we can't think of any situation that would require or potentially be able to use this amount of data bandwidth but it is still nice to know that it is there, even if the memory bandwidth can't keep up with the data rate of the SLI slots.
*Numbers are for concurrent upstream and downstream data traffic.
| AMD Opteron 275 |
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Foxconn NF4SK8AA-8EKRS |
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