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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 |
Other Peripherals
Since the definition of the LPC standard by Intel and its free licensing to any sign-up partner in 1999, this type of bus interface has become the method of choice for any multi I/O controller. In the case of the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS, it is an old acquaintance, namely the ITE LPC Multi I/O controller that is on duty, controlling the legacy hardware in the form of the floppy drive and the different communication ports such as serial and ECP parallel interfaces.
The ITE LPC controller; the two firewire ICs, I/O panel including analog and digital audio jacks; jumpers
IEEE 1394 Firewire
Additional connectivity is offered through two Texas Instruments firewire controllers working in tandem. The TSB81A3 IEEE P1394b Three-Port Cable Transceiver Arbiter running at gigabit signaling rate provides the digital and analog transceiver functions needed to implement a three-port node in a cable-based IEEE 1394 network. Each cable port incorporates two differential line transceivers. The transceivers include circuitry to monitor the line conditions as needed for determining connection status, for initialization and arbitration, and for packet reception and transmission. The TSB81BA3 is designed to interface with a link-layer controller such as the TSB82AA2 1394b OHCI-Lynx Controller which is the second TI IC found on the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS. Either device wholesales at approximately US$8 - in other words, we are looking at a combined value of approximately US$16 just for the firewire controller hardware, not to mention the integration costs. What you get though is a device that supports Connection Debounce, Arbitrated Short Reset, Multispeed Concatenation, Arbitration Acceleration Fly-By Concatenation, Port Disable/Suspend/Resume and Extended Resume Signaling for Compatibility With Legacy DV Devices, in other words, all the goodies in firewire land one could possibly think of.
8-channel audio
The nForce4 Professional supports 8 channel audio which is enabled by the Realtek ALC 850 CODEC, not the greatest sound solution in the world but certainly way above the somewhat sad reputation of the original AC'97 devices. For the true audiophile, other solutions are available in either PCI or PCIe format, there is enough bandwidth available to satisfy even the most data-hungry device.
Jumpers
Consumer-level boards have migrated to an almost completely jumper-free design norm, workstation and server boards still abide by somewhat different rules necessitated by the fact that many of these boards are used in extreme configurations with non-standard add-on hardware. Non-standard expansion cards sometimes have non-standard requirements or errata that require extra measures on the integration level. In this case, it does not seem to be asking too much to have a few jumpers on board, likewise, some things can only be achieved via jumpers.
One case in point is the BIOS Table Enable jumper JP1. Whoever had the misfortune of a BIOS flash gone bad or a total corruption of the BIOS, especially over a holiday may remember the old trick of shorting pins 2-3 on the older BIOS ROM chips to force the minimum boot block for a blind flash of the BIOS using a modified autoexec.bat file. In really old system, an ISA video card would even allow a screen display. Nonetheless, the procedure of sticking a screwdriver blade between the BIOS chip pins during power-up is not exactly for the faint hearted, especially with the new QFP chips, which is why Foxconn simply added a jumper serving the same purpose. Who would have thought…
Along the same lines, jumper J1B1 allows to select a user defined ROM table that contains personalized settings as opposed to the "default" settings that come up after a CMOS reset. We have seen similar technology in the latest line of DFI boards and this is definitely a highly commendable feature.
Additional jumpers are mostly for debugging purposes in that they allow the selection of different PCIe reference clock inputs or for the selection of the common mode level above or below VDD/2, an option that allows to accommodate a wider range of PCIe cards that may have some abnormalities or asymmetries in their signaling properties.
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Foxconn NF4SK8AA-8EKRS |
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