Foxconn, a traditional OEM manufacturer, has recently entered the retail market with its own motherboard line, using its own brand. For AMD platform, it is using WinFast brand, which was licensed from Leadtek.

WinFast 760GXK8MB is a socket 754 motherboard based on the SiS 760GX chipset, aimed to entry level PCs, since this chipset has on-board video based on Mirage 2 graphics engine from SiS. This engine is DirectX 8.1 and we were very curious to see how it performed.

This motherboard is very simple, as you can see on Figure 1. Besides having on-board video, it also has one AGP 8x slot, allowing you to disable the on-board video in the future and install a “real” video card.

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Figure 1: Foxconn WinFast 760GXK8MB.

This motherboad has “everything” on-board: video, audio and LAN, bringing also two Serial ATA ports. It has two DDR-DIMM sockets, accepting up to 2 GB of up to DDR400/PC3200 memory; its on-board audio is controlled by the SiS 760GX chipset using the Realtek ALC655 codec, providing 6 channels and a signtal-to-noise ratio of 90 dB, which is very good for this motherboard class; its LAN is also controlled by its chipset, using the Realtek RTL8201BL chip to make the interface with the physical layer; eight USB 2.0 ports, four soldered directly to the motherboard and four available thru an I/O bracket, but the board comes with a bracket providing only two ports. You can use the other two USB ports on your case, if it provides front USB ports.

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Figure 2: Two serial ATA ports and SiS 964 south bridge.

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Figure 3: Back connectors.

We were impressed by the quality of the electrolytic capacitors used on this motherboard. Usually low-end motherboards will also use low-end components, but Foxconn decided to use Japanese capacitors from Rubycon (http://www.rubycon.com) on this model, preventing the board from having the famous leakage that affects some motherboards after some years.

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Figure 4: Japanese capacitors from Rubycon.

On Figure 5 you can see the cables that come with this motherboard.

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Figure 5: Cables that come with WinFast 760GXK8MB.

Besides the motherboard drivers and utilities, in the CD-ROM that comes with this motherboard you will also find Norton Internet Security 2004 software for free.

Before going to the benchmarkings, let’s recap the main features of this motherboard.