Product Reviews

SLI motherboards are no longer rare nor any more expensive than standard motherboards. Foxconn's Winfast's NF4SK8AA is the latest nForce 4 SLI board to hit the market.

It takes any Socket-939 Athlon 64 processor and up to two PCI-E graphics cards in its dual PCI-E x16 slots. To put the board into SLI mode, you have to switch the module from Normal

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to SLI, just as with other boards we've reviewed. The only problem with using two graphics cards is they block access to the PCI-E x1 slot, although you've still got three PCI slots for other cards.

This motherboard provides the full range of features the nForce 4 chipset has to offer, including two network ports for connecting to multiple networks or sharing a network connection. You don't get FireWire ports, though. The headers are on the motherboard, but you will have to buy the ports separately.

We tested the board using an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor and 1GB of DDR memory in a dual-channel configuration. It scored 113 in the Shopper application benchmarks and 4,187 in PCMark04, which is about average for a board of this type.

The price is about average, too, but we'd rather spend an extra few pounds and buy the ECS KN1 Extreme SLI (see below), which performed slightly better and comes with more features.