FOXCONN NF4SK8AA-8KRS: Features

Foxconn designed an excellent board layout with all major connections easily reached. The board is lacking most clearance issues and was very easy to install in a mid-size ATX case. Foxconn did a very good job with the color coordination of the various peripheral slots and connectors. The 4-pin molex connector located next to the first PCI-E x16 slot is required when utilizing two video cards in SLI operation.

The DIMM module slots' color coordination is correct for dual channel setup. The memory modules are easily installed with a full size video card installed in the first PCI Express x16 slot. The power plug placement favors standard ATX case design and the power cable management is very good. The floppy drive port connector and the two nForce4 IDE port connectors are conveniently located on the front edge of the board along with the 24-pin ATX power connector.

The nForce4 SATA II ports are conveniently located down and to the left of the IDE port connectors. The SATA II ports feature the old attachment design that could create connection issues.

The CK8-04 chipset is actively cooled and is located in an ideal place on the motherboard.

The nForce4 USB connectors and System Panel connector are located along the left edge of the board. The CMOS reset is a traditional jumper design located next to the BIOS chip.

The board comes with (2) physical PCI Express x16 slots, (3) 32bit PCI slots, and (1) PCI Express x1 slot. The layout of this design offers a very good balance of slots and allows for numerous add-in peripheral cards.

In between the two x16 PCI Express slots is a PCI Express x1 slot. This configuration could potentially render this slot useless when utilizing the first x16 PCI Express slot. Also located in this area is the paddle card for SLI operation. We did not have any issues utilizing this slot with video cards containing single slot cooling systems, but we were unable to install a network card upon installation of a NVIDIA 7800GTX 512mb in the x16 PCI Express slot. The first PCI slot next to the second PCI-E x16 slot will be rendered useless when utilizing a two-slot video card cooling solution.

Returning to the CPU socket area, we find ample room for alternative cooling solutions. We utilized the stock AMD heat sink, but also verified that several aftermarket cooling systems would fit in this area during our tests.

Foxconn places the four-pin 12V auxiliary power connector at the top of the CPU socket area, but out of the way of most aftermarket cooling solutions.

The rear panel contains the standard PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, parallel port, LAN port, and 4 USB ports. Located below the parallel port and to the right of the PS/2 ports is the Serial Port, Coaxial S/PDIF, and Optical S/PDIF connectors. The audio panel consists of 6 ports that can be configured for 2, 4, 6, and 8-channel audio connections.

Albatron K8SLI: Overclocking FOXCONN NF4SK8AA-8KRS: Overclocking
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  • DAPUNISHER - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link

    Off to peruse your Intel articles.
  • DAPUNISHER - Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - link

    I enjoyed your review, your 1st for AT? but for a moment, I though I was reading a retro review from AT. I liked it better when AT eschewed 3D synthetics, and chose to bench the latest, greatest titles. Even D3 and FarCry seem long in the tooth IMHO. Many do still play FarCry, but most use all the new tweaks.

    Perhaps there is logic to the methodolgy that I'm missing? TIA for any illuminating reply, and I look forward to your future reviews here :-)
  • Gary Key - Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - link

    Hi,
    Actually, I have been covering the Intel reviews for the past few months. We are in the process of a transition over to the newer benchmarks. The last Intel article with those benchmarks can be found here-
    http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2631&am...">http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2631&am...

    The ability to go back and test all of the boards shown with the new benchmarks and driver sets was not possible. However, the next roundup should include newer benchmarks along with results from these three boards. Also, while FarCry and SC3 are "getting" long in the tooth they are both based on engines that can still stress a system by increasing the settings. They both offer a fairly good mix of cpu and gpu limited testing. The difference between D3 and Q4 is minimal except for SMP support now. We are also looking at providing repeatable and meaningful benchmarks for the RTS/SIM crowd without resorting to FRAPs. We plan on increasing the audio, power consumption, and disk RAID subject matter within the review process. You should see this process evolve over the next couple of months.
  • da2ce7 - Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - link

    I got the original ASUS A8N-SLI Premium with a AMD X2 3800+ and found the stability very less than satisfactory with any bios less than 1007. However over clocking has been mediocre, at the standard multiplier (10X) I can raise the FSB to 254, from 200, providing a reasonable over clock, anything higher than this I seem to be hitting the wall. The voltage options are a real disappointment only letting me raze them to 1.45v. However I get no difference when overlooking when my voltage is 1.4 to 1.45, (except for my core temp), with the old bios I could raze the v-core to 1.5 and run the FSB at 260 very happily (the system did sometimes crash every 32 hours or so), I did not test it any further then before upgrading to 1007.

    When upgrading from the bios 1005 to 1007 I found that it would not post after the update, after much delay and many tests and try's I found that my very low timings T1-2-2-2-5-2 for the ram stopped it from booting. I gained control of it from putting in a stick of very old pc2100 ram and re-set the bios timings to automatic.

    With your review I found it disappointing that you did not test the Silicone Ice raid controller, I have been wondering witch one I should run my hard drive on.
  • Gary Key - Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - link

    quote:

    With your review I found it disappointing that you did not test the Silicone Ice raid controller, I have been wondering witch one I should run my hard drive on.


    We will be including RAID results in future articles. There have been some issues with repeatable results utilizing a variety of benchmarks and of course drive configurations.

    I would run the native nF4 RAID setup over the SI3114 in this case (assuming RAID0). However, if it were the SI3132 chipset on the board I would probably call it a toss up at this time.
  • LX - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link

    Why would you bother to include a bunch of performance charts where the difference between the leading and the trailing boards is less than 5%?

    Don't you have enough important info to put in your articles instead of fillers?
  • Gary Key - Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - link

    quote:

    Why would you bother to include a bunch of performance charts where the difference between the leading and the trailing boards is less than 5%?


    Thank you for the comments. I think the purpose of the article was to show that performance between a $100 board and that of boards costing up to $250 (A8N32) is basically the same at stock speeds. The differences in pricing will usually (not all of the time) buy additional features and greater performance via stable overclocking.

    What would you like to see in our articles that we are not providing?
  • JustAnAverageGuy - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link

    It may be worth noting that in the 1011.001 BIOS, the maximum vcore drops to 1.500V with dual core processors. :)
  • Gary Key - Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - link

    We did not have an opportunity to finalize testing with the dual cores for the articles but this issue has been brought to Asus's attention. Thanks!
  • yacoub - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link

    Wtf is up with the BlueGears card?? Is that simply a driver issue or not? It's such an excellent audio solution it's beyond shocking to see it perform even WORSE than onboard sound solutions when it comes to cpu usage. wtf indeed! Generally simply being a peripheral PCI device sound solution means it should be well BELOW the usage of onboard sound. Now I'm worried about purchasing their new card coming out this month (X-Plosion - onboard DTS in addition to onboard DDL like the X-Mystique has).

    Please update us when you receive the new drivers and figure out why the cpu usage of this card during gaming is so atrocious. Thanks.

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