Foxconn's new mobo includes everything but the soundtrack CD.
After spending a solid minute fawning over the orange and black components on the very dark brown PCB (it looks rather stunning, after all), we managed to put the board down just long enough to get some benchmark scores, and of course, review it!
Built around the X58 chipset, which itself is manufactured on a 65nm process, this board takes advantage of pretty much every single available feature to the chipset (and even some more on top of it). Four physical PCIe X16 slots are fed by 32 PCIe lanes, giving either dual 16x Crossfire/SLI, or up to quadruple 8x Crossfire. The remaining four lanes provided by the chipset are in the form of a PCIe X4 slot.
At the back panel of the mobo there are quite a few ports including eight USB, PS/2, optical/coaxial digital output, Ethernet, Firewire and two eSATA ports. The latter are driven by an onboard chip. There's a large part of the northbridge cooling array here as well that allows some cool air to flow through it. Audio is provided through an add-in card called the 'Harp', which simply takes the onboard Realtek sound chip and moves it to a riser card. This should reduce some of the annoying electrical noises that some motherboards have, however, and plugs into a header just above the top PCIe slot.
The chipset cooling is why we wanted that soundtrack CD - at first glance we thought it was a speaker! Instead, this is an aluminium-finned heatsink with a clever imitation diaphragm, speaker cone and mesh. Underneath it is a curled heatpipe that joins the power regulation's heatsink. Sadly this potentially aurally-impressive system is less than impressive when it comes to cooling ability, heating up very quickly and becoming almost burning to the touch (the southbridge's small silver disc almost singed off our fingerprints!). A lot of airflow is not only recommended, but needed here.
Power filtering around the CPU socket is very nice, with plenty of solid caps and ferrite chokes to keep the electrons flowing reliably. There's also enough clearance on all sides to use large coolers, and most won't interfere with the memory at all. The six DDR3 slots are actually in a damn good place, far out of the way of the graphics card and any other potential interference. Power for the mobo and CPU is also very well-placed, and easily accessible.
Right-angled IDE, and six SATA ports (in the same cable-pluggingly handy orientation) are along the edge of the mobo, fed by the ICH10 controller. Funky black plastic with etched-out symbol buttons are located around these functioning as power, reset and clear CMOS. These oddly don't light up until the board is on, and it was only because we noticed the silkscreened text for the CMOS button that we actually know what it did - an exclamation mark in a triangle isn't quite... intuitive.
Along the bottom edge there are the usual headers, a mounted speaker, a removable BIOS chip and, very coolly, two SAS ports. These can be used with enterprise drives, and the motherboard comes with all the cables that you need to use them, as well as the other normal SATA cables. The bundle is actually pretty well rounded, if you're into a lot of cables that is.
Sadly for all these features, the board isn't a stellar overclocker. We managed to bump our i965 up to a QPI of 160 without touching the multiplier, but it wouldn't go any further, and was not stable enough to finish Cinebench when multithreaded. Overall, though, this is quite a good board, and would look great as part of a themed mod as well as giving you some capacity to overclock.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012