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Foxconn Winfast NFPIK8AA Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Monday, April 03, 2006
Board Layout and Features
Dual chipsets means dual of just about everything. Each chipset supports up to 20x lanes of PCI Express, 16x of which will be dedicated to video, some of the other features include dedicated Gigabit Ethernet piped directly into the HyperTransport and 4 native SATA2 connections per chip with full RAID support across the controllers.
Sadly nVidia RAID only supports levels 0, 1, and 10 so any benefit to having more than 4 drives is pretty much diminished. Had they provided support for a nice RAID 3 or 5 this limitation would have been diminished but nVidia seems slow to adapt and Foxconn didn't provide an alternative solution.
A welcome addition is the 4 phase powersupply, this will help in the stability department and if anyone decides to do some overclocking.
SLI is still big business and even though games have little business in the workplace Foxconn included an SLI bridge just in case.
