For the detailed review with benchies go to : Lostcircuits
An Opteron 875 will work in the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS as will any other Socket 940 processor, with or without dual core technology.
Summary
Foxconn is one of the world's largest OEM manufacturers of computer parts and only recently has started to enter the enthusiast market. Overall, the brand appears to be well-received, even though the naming conventions are somewhat counterintuitive. Enthusiast boards on one side, OEM boards on the other side, there is still ground to play and it appears as if the red tape was lifted at least for once to let the engineers and designers play their hearts out. The result is a true oddity in the conformistic world of motherboards - a dual chipset motherboard for a single - server class - CPU with two 16-lanes PCIe SLI slots that promise to deliver uncompromised bandwidth to the graphics adapters while in the background some super RAID configuration is on a rampage and the entire system talks to the intranet via dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Needless to say that the latter are protected by nVidia's own Firewall.
All of this could be nice and dandy but often enough, we have been dealing with hardware that looks great at first sight and then turns out to be a dog. To make a long story short, such worries turned out to be unfounded, on the contrary, the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS we were dealing with had a few other surprises for us with a few huge D'UH effects that left us marvelling why we have not seen the same features elsewhere - so simple were they. There is only so much we can say in two short paragraphs, but it sure might be worth reading the rest of this review.
Final Thoughts
On the other side of the coin is the actual mainboard, one of the finest pieces of hardware we have come across in a long time. From a reviewer's or expert standpoint, the most amazing feature of the board is the overall love and attention to detail, everything is where it is supposed to be and where it makes most sense. This includes the jumpers that only raise the question why not everybody else does the same thing, after all, it is so simple to add the boot block jumper or that for the user defined BIOS table.
Needless to say that the infrastructure of the board is spectacular by itself. A dual chipset for a single CPU may appear overkill but just the possibility to stripe or mirror over two SATA controllers with a huge bandwidth headroom to accomodate up to eight drives in a single array is something we can only marvel about. And then there are the performance numbers we showed earlier. Arguably, nobody in his or her right mind will stripe over 6 or 8 drives, the failure rates would be unacceptable. However, as a demonstration of the possibilities of the system on the chipset integration level, this configuration served us just right and, if nothing else, underscored what the mainboard is capable of. .
Dual 16 lanes PCIe slots for SLI appear a bit overkill. Keep in mind that all data have to move through the memory and the hypertransport interface and regardless of how wide the pipes are on the SLI bus, if the backend cannot supply more than 5500 MB/sec then 5500 MB/sec is all that will ever fill the 32 GB/sec capacity of the interface. In reality, again, there is the limitation that the 32 GB/sec are for concurrent read and write transfers, which leaves 16 GB/sec overall unidirectional bandwidth that is shared between the two cards. For a single card, this results in 8 GB/sec and all of a sudden, the headroom is there but no longer appears astronomical considering the fact that the two SLI cards work in AFR mode. In other words, there is some sense behind the strategy, even if consumer applications like games are not able to take advantage of it. The story may be entirely different for professional graphics applications such as CAD or high-end OpenGL and we'll follow up on that matter shortly. Another situation where the extra lanes may become important is high level anti-aliasing in SLI mode where additional data transfer from one graphcis adapter to the other will cosume extra bandwidth.
Of course, there is always the issue of whether any esoteric design, regardless of its idiosyncrasies and whatever plethora of fantastic features will have any niche in today's marketplace. In other words, even the greatest design will not be a commercial success if there is no interest in its features and capabilities. In the case of the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS, hopefully, there shouldn't be any worries, since this board is ideal for the system integrator, for the small business in need of a classy file server, for the CAD designer with need for extreme reliability and as a data base server taking advantage of the Error Checking and Correction capabilities of the memory subsystem. In other words, as odd as the design appears at first glance, the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS is a mouth-watering dream of professional motherboard come true for any system integrator who's capabilities go beyond navigation of the system configuration on Dell's website.
An Opteron 875 will work in the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS as will any other Socket 940 processor, with or without dual core technology.
Summary
Foxconn is one of the world's largest OEM manufacturers of computer parts and only recently has started to enter the enthusiast market. Overall, the brand appears to be well-received, even though the naming conventions are somewhat counterintuitive. Enthusiast boards on one side, OEM boards on the other side, there is still ground to play and it appears as if the red tape was lifted at least for once to let the engineers and designers play their hearts out. The result is a true oddity in the conformistic world of motherboards - a dual chipset motherboard for a single - server class - CPU with two 16-lanes PCIe SLI slots that promise to deliver uncompromised bandwidth to the graphics adapters while in the background some super RAID configuration is on a rampage and the entire system talks to the intranet via dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Needless to say that the latter are protected by nVidia's own Firewall.
All of this could be nice and dandy but often enough, we have been dealing with hardware that looks great at first sight and then turns out to be a dog. To make a long story short, such worries turned out to be unfounded, on the contrary, the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS we were dealing with had a few other surprises for us with a few huge D'UH effects that left us marvelling why we have not seen the same features elsewhere - so simple were they. There is only so much we can say in two short paragraphs, but it sure might be worth reading the rest of this review.
Final Thoughts
On the other side of the coin is the actual mainboard, one of the finest pieces of hardware we have come across in a long time. From a reviewer's or expert standpoint, the most amazing feature of the board is the overall love and attention to detail, everything is where it is supposed to be and where it makes most sense. This includes the jumpers that only raise the question why not everybody else does the same thing, after all, it is so simple to add the boot block jumper or that for the user defined BIOS table.
Needless to say that the infrastructure of the board is spectacular by itself. A dual chipset for a single CPU may appear overkill but just the possibility to stripe or mirror over two SATA controllers with a huge bandwidth headroom to accomodate up to eight drives in a single array is something we can only marvel about. And then there are the performance numbers we showed earlier. Arguably, nobody in his or her right mind will stripe over 6 or 8 drives, the failure rates would be unacceptable. However, as a demonstration of the possibilities of the system on the chipset integration level, this configuration served us just right and, if nothing else, underscored what the mainboard is capable of. .
Dual 16 lanes PCIe slots for SLI appear a bit overkill. Keep in mind that all data have to move through the memory and the hypertransport interface and regardless of how wide the pipes are on the SLI bus, if the backend cannot supply more than 5500 MB/sec then 5500 MB/sec is all that will ever fill the 32 GB/sec capacity of the interface. In reality, again, there is the limitation that the 32 GB/sec are for concurrent read and write transfers, which leaves 16 GB/sec overall unidirectional bandwidth that is shared between the two cards. For a single card, this results in 8 GB/sec and all of a sudden, the headroom is there but no longer appears astronomical considering the fact that the two SLI cards work in AFR mode. In other words, there is some sense behind the strategy, even if consumer applications like games are not able to take advantage of it. The story may be entirely different for professional graphics applications such as CAD or high-end OpenGL and we'll follow up on that matter shortly. Another situation where the extra lanes may become important is high level anti-aliasing in SLI mode where additional data transfer from one graphcis adapter to the other will cosume extra bandwidth.
Of course, there is always the issue of whether any esoteric design, regardless of its idiosyncrasies and whatever plethora of fantastic features will have any niche in today's marketplace. In other words, even the greatest design will not be a commercial success if there is no interest in its features and capabilities. In the case of the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS, hopefully, there shouldn't be any worries, since this board is ideal for the system integrator, for the small business in need of a classy file server, for the CAD designer with need for extreme reliability and as a data base server taking advantage of the Error Checking and Correction capabilities of the memory subsystem. In other words, as odd as the design appears at first glance, the NFPIK8AA-8EKRS is a mouth-watering dream of professional motherboard come true for any system integrator who's capabilities go beyond navigation of the system configuration on Dell's website.