Foxconn Winfast NFPIK8AA Motherboard Review

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. This game has some awesome graphics and is primed for use with next generation video cards. The only drawback is that the game comes with no default timedemo, so we recorded one and used the 2.0 shader for the benchmark. For those of you wanting to try this benchmark for yourself we can make the demo available, simply drop us a line.

Far Cry. This game is very similar to Serious Sam in that the maps are huge and have a ton of things to shoot. Granted the graphics are quite a bit better and the water textures are something to die for. For this benchmark we used the regulator demo and the following command line. "FarCry.exe -DEVMODE "#demo_num_runs=1" "#demo_quit=1" "#r_Width=800" "#r_Height=600" "map regulator" "demo regulator""

XviD Movie Encoding Test: This is a new test that was added to cover other sections of real-world performance. The test consists of a simple task of encoding a DVD rip from VOB to AVI with AutoGK 1.25 using the XviD codec. The movie used is the first chapter of Dirty Pair Flash #2 and consisted of 40104 frames. The time shown is how many frames per second were processed during the first pass to encode the video files.

The best of the best when it comes to real world benchmarks, this free program is available from eTesting Labs and uses real programs to test the overall performance of your computer. These programs include: Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1, Adobe Premiere 6.50, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980, NewTek's LightWave 3D 7.5b, and Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f.

Business Winstone is quite similar to the Content Creation benchmark but uses programs that you would most likely use in the office. These programs include Microsoft Access 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Excel 2002 SP-2, Microsoft FrontPage 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Outlook 2002 SP-2, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Project 2002, Microsoft Word 2002 SP-2, WinZip 8.1 SR-1, and Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003.

Gaming performance is largely dependant on video card performance; given that SLI is supposed to help in this arena it will only do so if there is enough processor power to feed the beast. Our systems are using Chaintech 6600 GTs, a single card on the DFI and SLI on the Foxconn. The lower resolution will remove video card dependency from the mix and the extra 200Mhz doesn't really mean much.

Riddick loves processor power, Far Cry favors the video card, (the lower score is due to SLI overhead), and video encoding doesn't care either way.

Winstone tests on the other hand love the NFPIK8AA, as it should.

Overclocking is next.