Foxconn P35 Mars

A cheap overclocker is a good overclocker

Looking further afield from the OEM space, Foxconn has a new focus; an evolved focus, one that is set to put Foxconn on the map for a market yet to truly feel its presence – our market.

The Foxconn P35 Mars is the first to appear from the recently announced Quantum Force series of motherboards. These boards have been developed for the enthusiast market and with overclocking in mind. Wanting to assure they did the job right, as they’ve been renowned for doing in the OEM space, Foxconn hired established and well-respected world overclocker Peter ‘Shamino’ Tan as the Quantum Force Technical Consultant.

With this strong enthusiast influence the expectations were high. It’s great to see manufacturers finally taking advantage of the expertise held by the enthusiast ‘big boys’ and it’s similarly fabulous to see these high level enthusiasts gaining recognition for their hard work, research and ingenuity. But there’s one big question – will it pay off in a publicly available retail product? Well, as enthusiasts and lovers of tech we can certainly and simply say “Hell yes”.

The board offers features that we’ve come to expect from the best motherboards out there. These features include solid state capacitors, onboard on/off, reset and CMOS clear buttons, a plethora of I/O options, dual PCIe 16x solution and support for the latest 45nm CPUs from Intel. These top tier features are found in a nicely and neatly laid out package. A lot of work has gone into the positioning of parts within the board’s layout.

It’s ever so common to find oversights such as the DIMM slot clips obstructed by a long primary GPU, SATA ports blocked by primary and/or secondary GPUs, onboard switches blocked, yep, again by GPUs. This board manages to avoid all but the last of these three issues. But it’s not a big issue as the onboard buttons are hardly unobtainable so all is good here too. Further adding to the layout considerations is the placing of the PCI slots in relation to the PCIe 16x slots. With a dual card dual slot cooling graphics monster setup, two PCI slots are still accessible.

Thrown through our benchmarks, the board performed on par with others in regards to FSB overclocking and memory tweaking capability, and excelled in not only being able to support the ‘typical’ overclock run in the labs but in doing so with less voltage necessary on certain parts such as north bridge and CPU v-core. One catch-22 worth mentioning at this point is that, although using less CPU v-core to hit a given frequency, the board did demonstrate some sizeable v-core drop, roughly 0.027v below the BIOS set value. In turn, this meant higher values were necessary to achieve a desired v-core.

Onto the results and the board demonstrated some best-in-class results – much faster than the previous P35 champ, the DFI P35-T2R. How much faster? In the Super Pi 4M benchmark; a whopping 0.734s faster! For such a gain to be seen from a motherboard is generally due to tight MCH latencies, and allows for more efficient communication between the CPU, MCH (north bridge) and memory.

The Foxconn P35 Mars finishes a sweet deal with a max 565MHz FSB on the labs processor and a truly killer price of $236!

We’re in love.