onboard LED to indicate that the system is plugged in. Why cheap out over a
2-cent part?
Given the boards’ performance similarities, it really comes down to fea-
tures and configuration, and on that score, Foxconn has the edge: It comes
with far better documentation and you get FireWire and more PCI slots.MOTHERBOARDS:A-ZnForce4 Motherboard Reviews
FOXCONN WINFAST NF4U8KAA
Think it’s nuts to spend the equivalent of two car payments on a couple
videocards, just so you can run SLI? Foxconn has you pegged as the penny
pincher you are, buddy. Extra SATA ports? Feh. Onboard wireless or dual
NICS? Who needs that crap? Just gimme the basics.
Foxconn has tailored its WinFast NF4U8KAA board for people like
you. Its straightforward feature set makes it the Toyota Tercel of mobos:
Forget the power seats, leather upholstery, or HID lights; those are for
wussies. But that’s not to say the Foxconn board is a complete strippo.
It uses the Ultra chipset, so you do get SATA 3Gb, RAID, and nVidia’s
Active Armor, which ups the amount of firewall features.
Foxconn also continues to offer the best combination of expansionCHAINTECH VNF4 ULTRA ZENITH VE
When you’re looking at a budget motherboard, it’s hard to get your groove up
over anything other than the price tag. That’s the problem we had when we
unwrapped Chaintech’s VNF4 Ultra Zenith Value Edition board: On the one
hand, it’s easy to yawn at the VNF4 Ultra’s build-out and be done with it; on
the other hand, you do get a helluva lot of features for the money.
nVidia’s hot nForce4 chipset is at the heart of the VNF4 Ultra. As you
might have guessed from its name, this motherbaord uses the Ultra ver-
sion of the chipset, which is almost on par with the SLI version of the
chipset (with the notable exception of SLI support). You get SATA 3Gb, a
hardware firewall with Active Armor, RAID support, Gigabit Ethernet, and
multichannel onboard audio.
So why are we so ho-hum about this board? It’s missing a few important
features: The VNF4 Ultra, for example, is the only board here that doesn’t
include a FireWire port. This is also the one board that offers only passive
chipset cooling; while that might help reduce noise and improve reliability
(fans do fail), we noticed that the single-chip nForce4 heated the chipset to
pretty high levels—especially with a GeForce 6800 Ultra sitting next to it. If
you choose this board, we recommend installing it in a case that’s well ven-
tilated.
Out of the box, the VNF4 Ultra was about 10 percent slower than its direct
rival, the Foxconn WinFast that’s also reviewed here; but after we updated
the Chaintech board’s BIOS, its performance improved to where it should
be. When all is said and done, there is very little difference in performance
between these two Ultra boards, including the fact that neither has anslots we’ve seen in mobos: You get four PCI slots, versus three on the
Chaintech. The Foxconn also aces the Chaintech by including a FireWire
port and providing far superior—albeit sometimes odd—documentation:
The manual warns you, for example, to run only certified PCI-E graphics
cards, and it lists just four that qualify. We commonly see this kind of lim-
ited recommendation for memory, which can be finicky, but to certify only
four videocards strikes us as arbitrary. Foxconn’s front-panel connector
labeling is also a tad confus-
ing, but suvivable. The BIOS
is feature-packed, and we
found that Super Boot mode
can cut down boot times by
about 25 percent.
In our benchmark tests,
the Foxconn was just a tad
faster than the Chaintech; but
you could safely call it a tie.
Interestingly, MSI’s SLI board
muscled past both these Ultra
offerings even while running a
single videocard.
It would be easy for
Foxconn to say, “Well,
what do you want for $120?”
But we could just as easily
retort, “For another $60, we
could have a board with
SLI capability.”40 MA XIMUMPC MAY 2005
VERDICT7
Lots of fan headers and a low, low price.
Lacks extra features and a power LED.$100 STREET, WWW.CHAINTECHUSA.COMVERDICT8
Generous PCI slots.
Lacks power-on LED.$120, WWW.FOXCONNCHANNEL.COM