Foxconn WinFast 6100K8MB-RS Motherboard Review

Introduction

Foxconn, a traditional OEM manufacturer, is now in the retail market with its own motherboard line, using its own brand. For AMD platform, it is using WinFast brand, which was licensed from Leadtek. Foxconn WinFast 6100K8MB-RS is a socket 754 motherboard based on the latest NVIDIA chipset with integrated graphics (a.k.a. on-board video): GeForce 6100. We were very curious to measure GeForce 6100 performance and compare it to commercial entry-level video cards, like GeForce 6200. That’s what we’ve done in this review, and also compared its performance to other chipsets with on-board graphics: VIA K8M800 and SiS 760 GX.

Figure 1: Foxconn WinFast 6100K8MB-RS.

Besides being a very simple motherboard targeted to socket 754 CPUs (socket 754 version of Athlon 64 and Sempron processors), as you can see in Figure 1, it has one 16x PCI Express slot, allowing you to disable its on-board video and install a real video card later, if you want.

Figure 2: This motherboard carries a 16x PCI Express slot.

This motherboard uses nForce 410 south bridge, having on-board video, audio and LAN, bringing also two Serial ATA ports supporting the new 300 MB/s speed (SATA-300). It has two DDR-DIMM sockets, accepting up to 2 GB of up to DDR400/PC3200 memory; its on-board audio is controlled by the nForce 410 south bridge using the Realtek ALC653 codec, providing 6 channels; its LAN is also controlled by its south bridge, using Realtek RTL8201BL chip to make the interface with the physical layer; eight USB 2.0 ports, four soldered directly to the motherboard and four available through an I/O bracket, but the board doesn’t come with any bracket.

Figure 3: Two serial ATA ports and nForce 410 south bridge (under the passive heatsink).

You can read more about the GeForce 6100 chipset family in our article NVIDIA GeForce 6100 and nForce 400 Chipset Family.

Theoretically this motherboard requires a 24-pin power supply (ATX12V v2.x standard, used on almost all motherboards based on PCI Express) but you can install a 20-pin power supply on it without any problem. You need to take a look at page 13 of its manual to see a picture of the correct installation of the 20-pin power supply on the 24-pin motherboard plug.

Besides the motherboard drivers and utilities, in the CD-ROM that comes with this motherboard you will also find Norton Internet Security 2005 software for free.

Before going to our benchmarking, let’s recap the main features of this motherboard.