Foxconn WinFast 6100K8MA-RS Motherboard Review
Conclusions
Contents
Who has the best on-board video, NVIDIA or ATI? ATI was better on 3DMark03 and NVIDIA on Doom 3. On the other tests they were tied. We can say they are technically tied. NVidia has a GeForce 6100 running at a higher clock rate, called GeForce 6150, which should achieve a higher performance than standard GeForce 6100 and Radeon Xpress 200. However, this isn’t important, as both achieved a lousy 3D performance and you can’t run modern games on them.
Comparing the other technical specs, the simplest version of NVIDIA 400 series south bridge (nForce 410) is far better than ATI’s counterpart, as it has SATA-300 with NCQ support.
A very interesting thing happened during our tests. When we installed GeForce 6200 TurboCache 64 MB 64-bit on WinFast 6100K8MA-RS, it achieved a lousy performance, thing that didn’t happen when we installed the same video card on our ECS motherboard based on ATI’s chipset.
It seems that there is an incompatibility between GeForce 6200 TurboCache and GeForce 6100, so pay attention to not use this motherboard together with a TurboCache video card, as you will lower your system 3D performance.
WinFast 6100K8MA-RS surprised us. It presented a great performance for its category and an excellent overclocking capability, plus it is the cheapest socket 939 motherboards around. And you can also install a real video card on it in the future.
It is great if you are assembling a cheap Athlon 64 system based on socket 939 – especially now that socket 939 is being phased out.
If you are looking for a socket 939 motherboard with on-board video, Foxconn WinFast 6100K8MA-RS is an excellent pick.