We’re just plain not sure about what this board’s trying to be.
Every once in a while there'll be a board come through the Labs that really looks to be something special. Clad completely in a black PCB, with heaps of incredibly handy overclocking features and a smaller form factor, surely this would be a good board? Well, think again.
Don't get us wrong, the layout is actually pretty good. The CPU socket area has solid capacitors and ferrite chokes, and plenty of room to install large coolers. Conveniently there are two fan headers here, one for the CPU and one for a system fan, which make it very easy to set up some decent cooling - or even double the amount of fans on your CPU cooler!
The DDR2 slots are placed very conveniently as well, with plenty of room to install modules even with large heatsinks or graphics cards installed - and great for those lazy tech writers too. There's also a silkscreened XFX logo between the socket and the slots, but this doesn't matter too much in the scheme of things, since the NB heatsink has one too!
The 24-pin power connector is located in the usual place, but funnily XFX has chosen to go with a 4-pin CPU power socket, and has placed it right in the middle of that curved part of the chipset cooling. Those with larger hands will find it annoying to install or remove the cable here, so just keep that one in mind, and we won't even mention the possibility of it getting in the way of airflow. Along the right-hand side of the board are six SATA connectors, all right-angled to let you plug them in easily in a cramped case. Also down in this corner are the front panel connectors, a hardware power/reset button pair, a LED POST screen, the board battery, and a built-in POST buzzer.
USB headers are along the bottom of the board, finally finishing with an audio header in the lower left hand corner. The expansion slots are pretty well fleshed out, giving you plenty of space for a graphics card, sound card or TV tuner, or even a RAID card. There are also a few solid capacitors around the slots and northbridge, but the majority of them on the board are electrolytic - a very poor choice on XFX's part, since solid capacitors are more reliable, and last much longer.
The back panel of this board has quite a few options, with six USB, Ethernet, a single PS/2 port, 7.1 channel analogue audio, VGA, DVI and HDMI. Those last three are fed by the chipset, which has a GeForce 9300 built into it. This graphics core isn't the most powerful by a long shot, but still offers decent performance and can be paired with an 8400/8500 to increase speed by a tiny amount. Also on the back panel is a clear CMOS button, which leads us to what is perhaps the most perplexing part of this board - overclocking, or lack thereof.
This board is bereft of any overclocking features in the BIOS. Sure we can change the timings on the memory, but we can't even change the frequency! Not to mention that there's no control over the FSB, nor any voltages for anything at all. And on top of all that, our RAM detected with a latency of 20-20-20-64! The complete lack of control of all these settings makes us wonder why XFX bothered including hard power buttons on the mobo - who is going to bench outside their case with this? And don't get us started on the clear CMOS button - how is it even needed if you can't overclock!?
Even through all this, the northbridge cooling array got very hot, and needed steady airflow to remain stable at stock settings. We'd recommend that you get this board if you're aiming for cementing yourself as a wannabe overclocker slash media center buff, but then we'd also recommend you put this mag down - you're not hardcore, and neither is this board.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012