At face value, Intel's Pentium D series CPUs don't appear to be very competitive with Athlon 64 X2s, but Intel's range has two distinct advantages: low cost, and easy overclocking. That's right - contrary to popular opinion, Intel's dual-core chips are cheaper than those of AMD, and even the cheapest, the bargaintastic £84 Pentium D 805, has bags of overclocking potential. Unfortunately, most desirable LGA775 motherboards cost a small fortune, far more than most Socket 939 nForce4 SLI motherboards.
Foxconn's new motherboard isn't going to change this, but there are other reasons to recommend it.
It's based on the Intel 975X chipset, easily the most desirable LGA775 motherboard chipset out there. In our experience, the 975X is a lot more overclockable than Intel's cheaper chipsets, or ATi and Nvidia's offerings. As with all 975X motherboards, and some 955X motherboards for that matter, the Foxconn supports ATi CrossFire, although on the Foxconn, the two high-speed PCI-E slots are placed quite close to each other, which isn't ideal from a cooling point of view. Foxconn would have been much better off locating both 1x PCI-E slots between the two high-speed PCI-E slots. Two standard PCI slots lurk at the far left edge of the motherboard.
The Foxconn has four DIMM sockets and can support up to 8GB of PC2-5400 DDR2. Even though the 975X chipset supports 533MHz FSB processors such as the 2.66GHz Pentium D 805, this Foxconn board doesn't - it only supports 800MHz and 1,066MHz FSB processors. Hopefully, Foxconn will be able to fix this in a BIOS update. Speaking of the BIOS, it provides a ton of options, including the ability to increase the vcore by a sizzling 0.3V and the voltage to the RAM by 0.6V. The FSB can be increased to a rather ludicrous 600MHz (2.4GHz effective) - not that any Pentium D or Pentium Extreme Edition has a chance in hell of running that fast.
On-board audio comes courtesy of the Intel HD Audio codec, which is pumped out by a Realtek ALC882 chip via a full set of analogue and digital outputs. Eight USB 2, two FireWire, a single EIDE, four S-ATA II and two S-ATA ports fill the rest of the PCB. Both the Northbridge and Southbridge are fitted with heatsinks, and the Northbridge is also fitted with a reasonably quiet fan.
The out-of-the-box performance of the Foxconn is curiously fast for even the mighty 975X chipset, and a closer examination of the BIOS revealed why. By default, the BIOS increases the FSB of your CPU from 200MHz to 225MHz at full load. In other words, our 3GHz Pentium D 830 booted into Windows at 3GHz, but sped up to 3.38GHz (225MHz x 15) when the PC was benchmarking. This might sound cheeky, but thanks to Intel's superb quality control, any Pentium D on the market today should be capable of running a 225MHz FSB.
Curiously, regardless of which BIOS settings we tweaked, when we tried to manually overclock the Foxconn, it simply wouldn't load Windows with the FSB set to 225MHz or higher.
Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of the FoxOne software, a Windows-based health monitoring and overclocking application. Using FoxOne, we were able to increase the FSB to 250MHz and the vcore from 1.3V to 1.45V, which overclocked our test chip to 3.75GHz (250MHz x 15). This isn't quite as good an overclock as those managed by the Asus and Gigabyte 975X boards in the recent motherboard Labs test, but it's better than the MSI 975X Platinum.
CONCLUSION
The Foxconn 975X7AA isn't much to look at, but it performs extremely well, thanks to the superlative performance of the 975X chipset and its rather cheeky, but very useful, automatic overclocking default setting. It's a shame then that the BIOS provides so many options but barely allows for any overclocking at all, although the Foxconn is a great overclocker in Windows. Ultimately, though, at £158.16, the Foxconn 975X7AA still doesn't meet our demand for a lower-cost 975X motherboard for budget-conscious power overclockers.
Author: James Gorbold
Custom PC Online