Smiting price tags and making waves, Foxconn's latest makes a lasting impression.
Foxconn has had some rather oddly named boards in the past (such as its Destroyer), but the Flaming Blade is the coolest damn name that's been given to a piece of tech in a damn long while. The colour scheme even manages to match it admirably; an all-black PCB with black and red components, highlighted by splotches of dull silver. It's the kind of board you fall in love with at first sight, and one that we're very taken with.
Based around the enthusiast X58 chipset this mobo has plenty of PCIe 2.0 lanes for either Crossfire or SLI, as well as enough room for a sound card or similar thrown into the mix. It features a 65nm northbridge chip that doesn't include a memory controller, which has been relocated onto the CPU die itself. The chip is located in the centre of the board underneath a large black plate, complete with brushed stainless steel logo and an extruded cover that reaches down to the southbridge. Even the power regulation is treated to a black and red heatsink, proudly baring the Flaming Blade name for all to see.
Expansion options are pretty good: eight USB, PS/2, optical, two Ethernet, two eSATA, 7.1 channel audio and a Clear CMOS button are all present. Audio is powered by a Realtek ALC888 audio chip, and should offer decent quality. The front panel audio header is in the bottom left corner of the board, lying next to the Floppy socket. Two USB headers are also along the bottom edge, accompanied by a front panel header and power/reset buttons. There's also an LED POST screen here that helps to identify hardware boot problems, though when POST is complete it doesn't show any other information, like temperature readings.
A right-angled IDE socket is on the right edge of the board, with six vertical SATA ports placed just out of the way of the first PCIe X16 slot. We'd swap these storage options in preference of SATA ports, but design-wise it makes perfect sense. The 24- and 8-pin power connectors are in the best places for easy use and cabling, but there's also a big red button next to the 24-pin socket. Usually these kinds of buttons make something self-destruct, but this one simply forces a hard reset of the motherboard - which can be very helpful if your overclock is being uncooperative. A very handy feature we haven't seen before is the header to turn off the rear Clear CMOS button, to prevent accidental pressing.
Three DDR3 slots, as opposed to the usual six, offer the same three channels, and as most people won't need more than 6GB of memory this is again a very good design choice that saves on money and PCB complexity. Doing so also means that there's less circuit traces running from the LGA1366 socket, meaning that mounting holes for both LGA1366 and LGA775 are present - you can run older heatsinks or waterblocks just fine on this mobo.
Overclocking was a relatively simple affair on the board, with most options labelled clearly. The menu structure was a little awkward at first, but once we'd found everything it was a breeze. We hit a max QPI of 164 on our engineering sample i965, which is just a shade off the maximum we've gotten it to before. This is above average overclocking performance, and definitely welcomed.
Of all the great ideas in the mobo, perhaps the best thing about it all is the price - weighing in at only $285 you'd be completely stark-raving mad not to pick this one. It overclocks well, has everything you'd need (and more), and is affordable. Go buy one now!
Issue: 133 | February, 2012