Throwback Time: Foxconn WinFast NFPIK8AA

Member when AMD ruled the enthusiast performance world with their A64 architecture?  I member I also member when NVIDIA SLI was limited to only two GPUs.  This wasn't due to internal politics or some sort of driver limitation.  No, it was hardware based and largely because CPU performance at the time wasn't all that good.  DX9 games still didn't use the GPU all that much and video cards were still migrating away from the AGP realm.

In this throwback Thursday I’m going to show you a little known enthusiast motherboard from Foxconn called the WinFast NFPIK8AA.  This was a workstation class motherboard that not only supported dual graphics cards but was double everything.  Dual cards, Dual channel memory, Twice as many SATA ports and Dual NVIDIA CK8-04-IO4 chipsets.  The board required Opteron based AMD SledgeHammer processors and registered DDR memory. 

The board really was a workstation class machine and allowed system builders to use PCI Express video cards in a professional capacity instead of just to play games.  Having twice as many chipsets onboard doubled the normal PCI Express bandwidth and doubled your storage capacity which was important back then due to hard drives being smaller.  Big RAID means big storage and speed.

I ran this motherboard for a short while and was even able to overclock it despite having a locked multiplier and registered memory.  This was accomplished by using the low latency Patriot memory and lots of trial and error. 

Saying “they don’t make them like this anymore” is an understatement as this board is extreme even by today’s standards.  While we sit back and watch CPU performance stagnate and PCI Express lanes double every few years there is some comfort in knowing that there is a reason for all of this.