Foxconn 975X7AB

Turning up too late to be part of Craig’s motherboard slugfest last month, we got our mitts on Foxconn’s revised 975X7AB board and set the hoops on fire to see how well this puppy would perform.

The is one of the few boards we’ve seen to include a Digital PWM, Foxconn’s Power Management system, which delivers better regulated voltage to the CPU and replaces the need for space-consuming capacitors and MOSFETs around the socket. The advantage is easier installation of oversized heatsinks and waterblocks, while voltage regulation makes it an ideal candidate for overclocking.

There are plenty of features here for tweakers and most are available through the Windows clocking app if you’re not comfortable under the hood. Even experienced users will be surprised by some of the options, with Vcore voltage adjustable in three percent increments to a maximum +24 percent. The PCI-E clock and DRAM values are more traditionally tuned.

There’s a physical on/off button to save you jumping the pins to juice it, handy for bench building before you dump it in a case, though that’s probably the last time you’ll use it. Traditionalists can still short the board the old fashioned way with a screwdriver, bottle opener or the fly of their jeans – just watch out for the fan blades.

Resetting the CMOS was a bit fickle on our sample, often taking a couple of clears to take affect, and even successful overclocks took anywhere up to 30 seconds to POST. We managed reasonable results with the board, getting our X6800 to a stable 3.3GHz but had trouble achieving big clocks on lower multipliers.

Board layout is good, with plenty of space between the memory sockets and neighbouring components, although the placement of the PCI-Express 16x lanes means you’ll be covering a single PCI-E 1x and one PCI slot if you’re running in a CrossFire setup. Due to placement, it can also be difficult to attach SATA cables with longer length graphics cards installed.

A reasonably feature-packed board, its big pull will be price before performance, representing one of the cheapest 975X boards around.