Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS

Overclocking with Foxconn Small price for large gains

The Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS wasn't designed to be a stellar overclocker, but we spent some time tweaking our processor's clock speed anyway to see how the board would fare. Please keep in mind that this is not an enthusiast class mobo geared towards the overclocking community though, so any overclocking gains are welcomed. We were able to raise the board's HT clock to 230MHz, bringing our CPU speed up to 2070MHz. For this, we had to set our memory speed to 333MHz, and raised our VDIMM voltage to the maximum 2.85v. We decided to use the CPU intensive Quake 4 as our overclocking benchmark, and ended up seeing some decent performance improvements. With the 6600GT installed, the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS originally scored 62.6FPS at 1024x768 with no AA/AF. While overclocked though, the score increased to 65.9FPS.

There are a multitude of applications that are well suited to a Micro-ATX motherboard like the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS. Custom cases of all kinds are built around these small motherboards. And anyone willing to take some time to do a little searching on-line will realize just how much the case modding community appreciates the Micro-ATX form factor.

Looking back on our experience, we found the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS to be a very capable little motherboard. Performance was almost on par with the extremely popular ASUS A8N Deluxe, and more importantly, we did not run into a single compatibility, performance, or stability issue. These are always important things to consider, but they're especially important if you plan on building a custom system that's hard to work on or even an HTPC. Who wants to see a BSOD on their new high-def plasma TV? Not us. We were also impressed with NVIDIA's latest integrated graphics solution. While it's not going to be best choice for gamers, it's robust enough for most other computing tasks, and is perfect for those of you looking to build a Home Theater PC. Our only complaints with the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS are its very basic accessory bundle and the fact that we couldn't manually set the Command Rate in the BIOS. Despite those facts, it's a good budget board at about $80 on-line and we feel the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS deserves an 8 out of 10 on our Heat Meter.

•_Micro-ATX Form Factor •_Inexpensive •_Good Feature Set •_Decent IGP performance •_No compatibility or stability issues	•_Basic Accessory Bundle •_Lack of certain BIOS Features

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