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Leadtek WinFast K8N Pro nForce3 Motherboard
Date: 2004-01-11 | Author: Chad Unrein
Company: Leadtek Research, Inc
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Introduction
All of the motherboards that are compatible with 32-bit AMD Athlon processors offered by Leadtek Research, Inc. feature an NVIDIA nForce or nForce2 chipsets. Not surprisingly, all of Leadtek's motherboard offerings for AMD's 64-bit CPUs feature NVIDIA's nForce3 150 chipset. Bjorn3D was fortunate enough to get its hands on the WinFast K8N Pro, which is one of Leadtek's two Socket 754 motherboards. The socket on these motherboards will fit AMD's Athlon 64 chips but not the Athlon 64 FX or Opteron CPUs.
The WinFast K8N Pro offers a plethora of features, including four SATA connectors (supporting RAID 0, 1, and 0+1), support for six USB 2.0 ports (2 from front panel header), and an onboard Realtek ALC-658 chip for 6-channel surround sound. Another feature this motherboard boasts is a data security system from eNova called X-Wall IDE. One of the three IDE connectors is coupled with eNova's X-Wall LX-64 chip, which provides encryption for the hard disk connected to that IDE connector. Data can be read from that drive only when the hardware encryption key is inserted into the appropriate port (IEEE1394 connector). This security mechanism requires no device driver, making it completely independent of and invisible to the installed operation system. Leadtek definitely wanted to separate this motherboard from all others on the market with this data security feature. It provides a quick easy way to protect an entire hard drive's data. For more information on this feature, please check out this page.
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Specifications & Features
I've included only some of the features and specs below. For a more exhaustive look at these, please check out Leadtek's K8N Pro product page.
Specifications:
Features:
Package Contents:
 Plenty of SATA cables, IDE cable, and floppy cable |
 Manual, CD, IEEE1394 bracket, and X-Wall Security Key |
Board Layout
Leadtek chose an interesting layout for this board, mainly with respect to the drive connectors. The floppy drive connector is located on the board's edge adjacent to the PCI slots. That seems quite odd to me. Also, the primary and secondary IDE connectors are separated. The two IDE connectors grouped together are the primary and the x-Wall IDE connectors. The secondary IDE connector was placed near the ATX power connector on the other side of the board. Very interesting indeed. Actually, this is probably better than all of these connectors being placed too close to each other. However, I am guessing this could be a major negative for some people.
For some reason Leadtek only gives us two available fan connectors on this mainboard. That hardly seems like enough for today's cooling needs, and I am surprised they did this. I realize it is just one less fan header than most boards have, but I am sure many PC enthusiasts have wanted more fan connectors, which makes reducing the count by one seem that much more disappointing.
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Leadtek also made some good choices on this mainboard's layout. The placement of the IEEE1394 connectors near the edge of the board was a good decision, since it prevents the cables from the IEEE1394 breakout module from getting in the way as much as they do when the connectors are placed elsewhere. The three DIMM slots and most everything else seem to be positioned well enough to prevent any major installation issues.
Installation
To test out Leadtek's WinFast K8N Pro, I decided to use the following components:
- Chieftech X-Sonic Mid-Tower Case (review)
- SilverStone 400W SST-ST400 PSU (review)
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+
- Zalman CNPS7000A-Cu HSF (review coming soon!)
- Corsair TWINX1024-3200LLPRO (review coming soon!)
- Reference GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
- Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 80GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer
- Pioneer DVD-ROM
- Sony floppy drive
I did not experience any problems with using all these components with the K8N Pro. Potential problems of particular concern lately for me are large HSFs, which the Zalman HSF definitely is, and capacitors near the AGP slot that could cause video card installation problems. Neither of these were problems with this setup, and the motherboard certainly deserves much of the credit for that.
Once all the hardware was in place, I installed 32-bit Windows XP Pro (and Service Pack 1) without a hitch. The only potential issue some people who are doing a similar install (setting up OS on a SATA drive) may have is that it is necessary to have a floppy disk with the SATA drivers on it ready during the Windows installation. The drivers must be installed in order for the installation routine to be able to recognize the SATA drive.
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