A massive aluminum heatsink is mounted on the GeForce 6150 North Bridge on this mainboard. This should be enough to cool the 90nm chip. The role of the South Bridge on the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS is played by an nForce 430 chip. Thus, the mainboard uses the most advanced North + South Bridge combination from NVIDIA. The nForce 430 MCP is also covered with an aluminum heatsink.

Using the South Bridge’s capabilities, the mainboard offers you two Parallel ATA and four Serial ATA II ports, eight USB 2.0 ports as well as sound and network. The integrated network controller is implemented according to the chipset specification. It is coupled with a PHY chip Marvell 88E1111, supports data-transfer speeds up to 1Gbps and features the hardware ActiveArmor technology which allows NVIDIA’s Firewall 2.0 to work without putting any big load on the central processor.

The implementation of the audio section is rather questionable, however. Although the nForce 430 MCP supports High Definition Audio, the Foxconn engineers put a Realtek ALC850, i.e. an ordinary AC?7 codec, on board. This codec can work with eight-channel speaker systems, but there’s no talk about HD quality here. So, Foxconn killed one of the key advantages of the new NVIDIA chipset for some unknown reason.

NVIDIA’s South Bridges do not support the FireWire interface, so an external PCI controller from Texas Instruments is installed on the mainboard for that purpose.

The mainboard’s rear panel carries a D-Sub connector for an external monitor, one parallel and one serial port, PS/2 connectors for the keyboard and mouse, one RJ-45 network connector, four High-Speed USB ports, one FireWire port and six audio jacks.

The BIOS Setup of the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS offers some CPU overclocking options. You can increase the clock-generator frequency up to 300MHz and the CPU voltage up to 140 millivolts above the default value. The memory voltage can be increased up to 2.85V. Frankly speaking, these overclocking options did not work on our sample of the mainboard ?they are to be enabled in future BIOS updates. But Cool’n’Quiet technology already works normally on the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS.

Foxconn supplies an exclusive software bundle with its mainboard. It includes a system monitoring tool and utilities to change the boot-up image and to update the BIOS. Don’t also forget about exclusive utilities from NVIDIA. So far, only NVIDIA Firewall 2.0 can work with the GeForce 6150, but the rest of the suite is going to support the new chipset in near future, too.

Despite its big potential, the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS left us somewhat unsatisfied. It seems an unfinished product as yet, but we hope all the problems will be corrected in next BIOS updates. In its current state the mainboard doesn’t even allows reflashing the BIOS chip ?the computer hangs up during the process irrespective of the tool you are trying to update the BIOS with.