Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS
Taking a closer look
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Those of you looking for an ornate beast of a motherboard to install into your large, spectacular cases decked out with multiple fans, windows and cathodes, probably won't go for a Micro-ATX board like the WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS's, but the Micro-ATX form factor is perfect for case modders or those looking to build more specialized systems like a media center or Home Theater PC (HTPC). It's small size makes the board easier to integrate into most enclosures and the use of passive cooling on its chipset makes for a lot less noise. Those of you looking for a motherboard for a HTPC setup will certainly appreciate the silence offered by the WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS's.
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Because there is much less space to work with in the Micro-ATX form factor, the WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS's layout has a lot in common with the rest of the Micro-ATX motherboards out there. To the top right, you'll see your four DIMM slots, which support up to 4GB of DDR400 (PC3200) Memory. And the ATX Power connector, two IDE-ATA133 connectors and the Floppy port are located just behind the DIMM slots along on the front edge of the board.
Looking to the bottom left of the board, you'll notice the single PCI-E x16 slot, and three PCI slots. Though most devices are available in standard PCI format, we would have liked to have seen at least one PCI-E x1 slot but this is not a deal breaker by any means. On the bottom right you'll see the passively cooled Southbridge chip, as well as four SATA connectors. Finally, the large aluminum heatsink in the middle is in charge of keeping the GeForce 6150 chip cool. Even with its integrated graphics processor, a simple aluminum heatsink is enough to keep the chip running cool.
The GeForce 6150 IGP supports DirectX 9.0, Shader Model 3.0, OpenGL and NVIDIA's PureVideo Technology. PureVideo accelerates MPEG2 and WMVHD video playback in hardware, which offloads the video decoding tasks from the host CPU, freeing its resources for other tasks. And the DX and OpenGL support means the 6150 will be able to run just about any game on the market. It may not offer enough power for high-framerates, but the features necessary to even launch today's games are there. That is not something that can be said for all competing IGPs.
The I/O backplane is home to four USB 2.0 ports, a single Firewire port, an RJ-45 Gigabit LAN jack, legacy parallel, serial and PS/2 ports, 6 audio jacks, and a DB15 video output. All of the ports are powered by the nForce 4 chipset, in conjunction with a Marvell PHY (LAN), a Realtek AC'97 audio codec, and a Ti controller (IEE1394).
