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Foxconn NF4SLI7AA-8EKRS2


Date
: 01/13/06 – 08:42:08 PM

Author
:

Category
: Motherboard

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer:
Foxconn

Price:
NA

It has been years since our last look at a Pentium 4 motherboard that wasn't based on an Intel chipset. Ever since Intel's move to dual-channel DDR they've kept a firm dominance. Early on SiS had a worthy competitor, but nothing developed. Today we've seen a few chipset refreshes out of Intel as well as some added competition from the boys who were best known for their graphics logic: nVidia and ATi.

What we're looking at today is an nForce4 SLI Intel Edition motherboard from Foxconn. It's good to see a company like Foxconn finally making products for the retail masses, and more particularly the enthusiast. I personally associate the company with high quality components; if you've ever opened up or worked on an Apple computer you'll probably find many Foxconn parts.

The focus today is on Foxconn's
NF4SLI7AA-EKRS2
motherboard for the Intel Pentium 4 Socket 775 platform. Let's start by looking at this board's packaging…

Page 2 : Package

The Foxconn packaging exudes the quality of a high end part. What you see is a thick plastic cover that slides off to reveal a black and orange box, and inside the accessories layered above the motherboard.

These accessories include the typical cables, brackets, documentation, and driver disks. As far as the quality of the documentation goes, the manual covers almost everything you'll need, and is also pretty thick for only containing one language (English).

Foxconn includes an SLI bridge that will come into use for certain SLI capable graphics cards.

Also included were extra USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394b rear panel brackets. The board supports a total of ten USB 2.0 ports, six of these are supported through the internal motherboard headers. The odd bracket is used to hold down the SLI bridge when it is in use.

Now that we've seen what this board ships with, let's take a quick look at the specifications followed by an examination of the board itself.

Page 3 : Specifications

The following specifications come straight from Foxconn's site:

Much like the 945P utilized on the EPoX EP-5LDA+ GLi, the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition sported by the Foxconn NF4SLI7AA-8EKRS2 supports many of the same features including dual-core processors, the 1066 MHz FSB, dual physical PCI-E 16x graphics slots, and built-in support for SATA II with RAID.

What sets this board apart though is it's native support through the MCP04 southbridge for RAID levels 0, 1, 0+1, and 5 across four SATA ports. In addition to that, two more ports offer support for RAID levels 0 and 1 through the Silicon Image SiI3132 SATA II controller. On top of these storage options, the board is able to take full advantage of nVidia's SLI graphics technology, comes equipped with dual GbE network ports (one PCI, and the other PCI-E), as well as support for 800 Mbps IEEE 1394b.

The 8-channel audio is provided by the onboard Realtek ALC850 CODEC. This is an AC'97 (as opposed to HD) and more information can be found on it here. You can contrast that with the Realtek ALC880 that's found on the EPoX EP-5LDA+ GLi.

The features of this board should be very enticing for most users.

Page 4 : Layout

Shown below is the NF4SLI7AA-8EKRS2 as it appears right out of the anti-static bag. The board consists of two PCI slots, two 1x PCI-E slots (three when in normal mode), and finally one 16x PCI-E graphics slot. When the board is put into SLI mode with the paddle board, the two physical 16x slots switch their lanes from 1x and 16x to both 8x. The memory expansion consists of four DDR2 DIMM sockets supporting up to 4GB total memory. On the storage front, there is are two ATA-133 IDE channels, floppy connector, and six SATA ports.

The layout of the board is good. The 24-pin ATX power connector is in a descent spot away from the socket area. Those installing long video cards may need to be wary of the caps next to the DIMM slots; the 6800GSs used in testing were long enough to pass by them, but they sit rather close, so be careful when inserting/removing long video cards. Something that's missing that I really like seeing are the color coded front IO jumpers.

The board has connections for dual Gb LAN, 8-channel audio, four USB 2.0, parallel, serial, and PS/2, and S/PDIF optical and coaxial out.

The northbridge and southbridge each have ample cooling provided; the former actively cooled and the latter passively. In the shot below you can see the Silicon Image SATA II controller, all six SATA II ports and finally two large integrated circuits at the top. Those two chips are the Texas Instruments TSB82AA2 and TSB81BA3 that enable IEEE 1394b connectivety.

The Foxconn NF4SLI7AA-8EKRS2 supports up to 4 GB of DDR RAM across four DIMM sockets. In order for the dual channel DDR2 to function, the memory needs to be paired according to the color coded banks.

Page 5 : Installation

Installing the Foxconn NF4SLI7AA-EKRS2 yielded no problems. I left the setup out of a case so I could switch motherboards more easily and frequently. No problems were encountered during setup, and all memory (SimpleTech, PDP, Corsair, PQI) that I threw at it showed no capability issues.

Installed onto a SATA setup, Windows setup proceeded normally. After setting up Windows and loading the chipset and LAN drivers from the included disk, things proceeded fine and all the updates were installed. With all the updates in place I installed the audio drivers and video drivers. The audio software has a basic look to it that would look nearly perfect with some added polish to fonts and some of the images, but the functionality is what counts.

Foxconn includes a some useful software utilities that run within Windows to easily monitor system functions and allow for BIOS updating. They are pictured below:

Foxconn's utilities are functional, but they could obviously use some polish in the GUI. I would personally prefer manufacturers to spare us the fancy GUI and just serve up something basic (ie. Windows standard).

Page 6 : BIOS & Overclocking

The NF4SLI7AA-EKRS2 uses a Phoenix-Award BIOS like the EPoX board. The BIOS provides all the options you'd come to expect from an enthusiast motherboard, offering all the expected voltage tweaks and frequency adjustments. You can get a better look at some of the individual screens below. The only comment I have on the BIOS is that the frequency and voltage tweaks are a bit buried in the menus, however they are there.

The Foxconn NF4SLI7AA-EKRS2 allows manual adjustment of memory timings from 1-1-1-1-1 up to 6-7-7-31-31 (CAS, RCD, RP, RAS, RC) which affords the user incredible amounts of room for tweaking.

From the voltage pictures above, you are able to view the maximum voltage settings as well as the intervals available for the processor, memory, southbridge and northbridge.

Overclocking the 2.8 GHz Prescott on the NF4SLI7AA-EKRS2 resulted in my best overclock ever for this chip. I was able to achieve a stable 3.514 GHz frequency throughout testing (over 100 MHz faster than anything I've been able to achieve on an Intel chipset), and was able to go even higher, though at the cost of stability. Unlike the 915P and 945P chipsets from Intel, the nForce4 Intel Edition had no problem with memory dividers, locking the PCI-E frequency or severe clock throttling at high clock frequency testing.

My thoughts after using a non-Intel chipset, particularly this one, are that if you're a serious overclocker you probably want to steer clear of Intel's current 9xx chipsets. The four boards I've tested based on said chipsets have been decent overclockers, but would appear to have been holding things back.

Page 7 : Testing

The suite of benchmarks used consisted of PCMark 2005, ScienceMark 2.0 Build 21MAR05, SiSoft Sandra 2005 SR2, Super Pi 1.1, Everest v2.20.405, 3DMark2k1 SE, 3DMark2k3, 3DMark2k5, HDTach 3.0.1.0, and RightMark 3DSound. A run through of games (Doom3, FarCry, and Unreal Tournament 2004) has been included for a small range of SLI comparisons.

The tests were conducted using the following systems:

The Foxconn board demonstrates a slight advantage in most of these benchmarks with a few showing a clear advantage in memory latency and bandwidth.

Focusing on the audio CODEC's performance, we see that the Realtek ALC850 quite taxing on the CPU, even more so than the ALC880 found on the EPoX board. It is worth pointing out that the ALC850 was the only CODEC tested able to process more than 32 buffers, while the C-Media CODEC wouldn't process anything more than 16 (with the exception of 32 with DirectSound2D).

What it comes down to is that if you're heavy on the positional audio, you'll benefit heavily by freeing up those CPU cycles with the addition of a discrete audio card.

Continued on the next page…

Page 8 : Testing (continued)

The Foxconn shows a nice advantage in a handful of these applications, most likely benefiting from better memory performance. Lets take a look at some games…

Page 9 : Testing (3DMarks & Gaming)

Only 3DMark2001 SE shows a significant difference in score between the stock Foxconn and it's competition.

Gaming performance shows a small improvement with the Foxconn board, but the differences are insignificant. Enabling SLI here where none of these games are bottlenecked by the GPU results in a slight loss in performance for in many cases.

Page 10 : Testing (Gaming w/SLI)

Below is a picture of the setup for SLI testing.

And now for those SLI numbers in a slightly more demanding gaming environment…

Here SLI shows greater use. With the increase in pixel processing, having that second GPU in tow can really start to show benefits.

Page 11 : Conclusion

This is the first retail Foxconn board I have tested, and all I can say is that Foxconn is delivering a great motherboard here. I am very impressed with their quick delivery of an excellent enthusiast part that offers the best Pentium 4 overclocking I've seen in a long while. Couple that with a completely working set of features, up-to-date connectivity and you've got yourself one hell of a bundle.

What else is left to say? I think this is seriously the best Intel motherboard I've used in years now. I think a lot of the benefit comes from nVidia's nForce4 chipset, but if you've ever used any variant of nVidia's chipsets you'll feel very comfortable knowing that the same quality and direction towards the enthusiast is still there.

Advantages:

Vastly superior overclocking over Intel chipsets
Dual-core support
SLI support
Very stable

Disadvantages:

BIOS could be organized better
Software utilities could use polish

I'd like to give our thanks to Foxconn for supplying the motherboard to make this review possible.