All aboard!
Throughout computing history, many comparisons have been drawn to other facets of society. Gamers, electronics geeks, and even scientists have been remembered for using excessive computer gear – but that’s where Foxconn pushed the bar even higher. By going Naval.The box for this motherboard is, by all normal reasoning, completely insane. Adorned with a battleship, it’s twice the size of most normal mobo boxes – but comes with an equally impressive array of goodies inside. You’ll get SLI bridges in Dual and Tri setups, a Foxconn branded 12cm fan, additional heatpipe/heatsink extension module, six SATA cables, SATA to molex power converters, IDE/floppy cables, Optical/Coaxial bracket, manuals in three separate flavours, cable ties, temporary tattoos, stickers, dogtags, a plastic sheet with large standoffs to bench outside a case, and a kitchen sink. Yes, they include the sink (no, they do not –ed).Apart from the bundle that includes everything you could ever need (evar!), the board itself is very fleshed out, with plenty of room around the CPU socket to install large coolers. There’s a decent amount of room around the memory slots too, but you’ll have to remove the graphics card in order to interchange memory sticks. Both the 24-pin and 8-pin power connectors are placed very nicely, providing an easy cabling job for the budding builder. IDE, floppy and six right-angled SATA ports all lie along the usual side of the board, as well as a board-mounted speaker that is very handy for POST messages. A plethora of headers are located in the bottom-right corner, giving access to the front panel connectors, as well as USB and Firewire. Audio is located along the bottom of the board, and is pretty accessible.The expansion slots are pretty well organised too, with enough room for TriSLI and an extra card running PhysX, though this would almost definitely be heavily bottlenecked by the processor, and the fact that each lane only supports 8x electrical bandwidth when all four slots are used. Audio, Ethernet and all the usual add-in chips are located just next to these slots, providing quite a few of the inputs on the back panel.This panel, naturally, has two Ethernet, 7.1 audio, six USB ports, two eSATA, one Firewire, a single PS/2, and VGA/DVI connectors. Apart from being very full, this amount of expansion provides enough ports for pretty much anyone, especially considering that you’ve got the USB headers onboard to continue adding ports.All of this is powered by the NVIDIA 780a chipset, which contains an integrated graphics core that is DX10 compatible, and offers hardware acceleration of HD video. You’d have to be relatively mad to get a board like this without a graphics card, but it’s still a nice inclusion. You can also pair this integrated graphics processor with either an 8400GS or 8500GT to give a small boost to performance, though we haven’t found this to be amazing in our previous testing. As a rough guide, the performance of this core would place it as an 8200GS, so don’t expect any kind of serious gaming from it.The BIOS options are complete, and include voltage controls for everything that you’d ever want to play with. Most things are clearly labelled, and those that aren’t are explained quite well in one of the three manuals. Performance of the board was pretty good, though heat prevented the HTT bus being pushed much over 244MHz, giving an effective speed of 3172MHz. The full features are attractive, though, making this an attractive purchase for any AMD fan. What the…?When you increase the HTT bus on this board, something very peculiar appears on the BIOS screen just as you tick over 230MHz. Check out the following list for the completely pointless rankings given to each stage (though they were good for a laugh):231-238 Recruit239-246 Backwash247-253 MidShipMan254-261 Flotilla Ahoy262-269 Choppy Sea!270-276 Dog Watch!277-284 Go Battalion!285-292 V Formation!293-299 Shellback!300-307 Rear Admiral308+ Jack Sparrow?EDITOR’S NOTE: I cannot tell you the apoplexy these titles induced in me. Battalion? That’s an infantry formation! Dog Watch? What does the last watch of the night have to do with anything?! Shellback?ARGH!@11!1
Issue: 133 | February, 2012