Verdict: Everything you need at a bargain price

Foxconn isn't a name you hear often, mainly because the company only ever used to make motherboards for the OEM market, as well as just about every piece of plastic found on other manufacturers' motherboards. The Winfast name isn't new to us, though, as it's been used by Leadtek for quite some time. In fact, it turns out that all previous Leadtek motherboards were actually made by Foxconn.

It's certainly not much of a looker, though, especially compared with some of the other boards in this test. The brown colours and basic design are best described as functional. The component layout isn't great either, as the 16x PCI-E slot lies directly in line with the chipset, while a Molex socket in the top left corner of the motherboard makes it extremely difficult to build a tidily-cabled PC.

There are plenty of expansion options available, though, with four PCI slots, two 1x PCI-E slots and, of course, the 16x PCI-E graphics slot. There are also four S-ATA II ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port and 8-channel sound, which is pretty much everything you could sensibly ask for from a budget motherboard.

The BIOS is also fairly tweakable, with notably impressive voltage controls. Pumping 1.8V through a Winchester-core Athlon 64 should be more than enough to roast it, should you feel the need. But, despite these voltage controls and a fully functioning PCI and PCI-E lock, the maximum FSB is capped at a rather conservative 250MHz. However, by lowering the multiplier and using ClockGen, the Foxconn happily ran with a 290MHz FSB in Windows. Unfortunately, with the multiplier returned to normal, only a 230MHz FSB was possible. Not standing for this, we set CPU voltage in the BIOS and then successfully used ClockGen to increase the FSB to 290MHz, so Foxconn obviously has some BIOS bugs to sort out.

At £79.84, this is one of the cheapest nForce4 Ultra boards you can buy, and makes the Abit AX8, which lacks S-ATA II support and only has 6-channel audio, look rather expensive.

If you're on a tight budget, but still want all the latest features (bar SLI), then the Foxconn is the best value for money.

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