Conclusions
With a street price of only $225 at Newegg, the NFPIK8AA is remarkably inexpensive considering its wealth of PCI Express, Serial ATA RAID, Gigabit Ethernet, and Firewire connectivity. Unlike some boards, whose extra Serial ATA and Gigabit Ethernet are constrained by the PCI bus, the NFPIK8AA's SATA and GigE ports have access to plenty of HyperTransport bandwidth.

When compared with the Asus K8N-DL, which costs $50 more, the NFPIK8AA offers SLI support, more PCI Express slots, a second Gigabit Ethernet option, 1394b Firewire, and the ability to span RAID arrays across up to eight Serial ATA drives. The K8N-DL may have an extra CPU socket, but with dual-core Opterons trickling onto the market, the extra socket is really only necessary if you want to run a dually with four cores.

Unfortunately for Foxconn, AMD tells us that dual-core Opteron 100-series chips won't be available for Socket 940. Instead, new Opteron 100-series chips will be released in a 939-pin package that won't require registered memory. That will lower the cost of the Opteron 100-series platform, but it tanks the NFPIK8AA's CPU upgrade path in the process. The NFPIK8AA is still compatible with dual-core Opteron 200-series chips, but those carry a price premium over 100-series chips. The higher cost is justified, of course, since Opteron 200-series chips can be run in pairs. That value will be lost on the single-socket NFPIK8AA.

Given AMD's plans not to offer dual-core Opteron 100-series chips for Socket 940, enthusiasts are probably better off passing on the NFPIK8AA in favor of upcoming Socket 939 Opteron platforms. The processors will be cheaper, and so will the memory. Workstation users who want registered DIMMs or ECC may not mind shelling out the extra cash for an Opteron 200-series processor. If so, they should be quite happy with the NFPIK8AA. The board would make a fine entry-level or even mid-range workstation platform, and given its dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and ability to span RAID arrays across up to eight Serial ATA drives, it also has potential as an inexpensive storage server. At the very least, it's left us anxious to see what Foxconn may offer for 939-pin Opterons when they arrive.