Intel's 975X chipset has impressed us before with its performance, but Foxconn has taken it a step further with its Fox One 975X7AA motherboard. With a dedicated Fox One chip, this board can be overclocked through the BIOS or the bundled Windows software. This makes overclocking easier, but mistakes are still possible so Foxconn has included several ways of recovering your PC in case you push the BIOS too far.
Even if you never play with the overclocking settings, you'll still be impressed with this board. Its performance, using a Pentium 4 560 and 1GB of DDR2 memory, was excellent - much better than we'd expect from an Intel 945 or Nvidia nForce 4-based board. As well as the dual PCI-E x16 slots for ATI CrossFire systems, it has two Gigabit LAN ports, an external SATA port, four SATA2 RAID ports and two PCI-E x1 ports. You also get all the cables and connectors you need to build your new PC.
We expect the cost of new boards to be quite high, so it's good to see that Foxconn's Fox One 975X7AA is almost £20 cheaper than Gigabyte's similarly specified GA-G1975X. It's also quicker and has more features, so it's definitely a Best Buy. If you're looking for the best performance and you're not interested in Nvidia's SLI, this is ideal. If, however, you're on a tight budget then ECS's single x16 slot 945G-M3 is almost £100 cheaper.
System Specifications
MOTHERBOARD Intel 975X chipset, supports Intel LGA775 processors, two PCI, two PCI-E x1, two PCI-E x16, four DIMM slots, two Gigabit Ethernet LAN, four SATA2, four USB2, one external SATA
Author: David Ludlow
Computer Shopper Online