Foxconn X38A Motherboard Review

The BIOS

The BIOS was made by AMI. The BIOS itself is very thorough.

This is the starting BIOS screen. The BIOS has no shortage of options. However, one minor complaint exists. Most of the menus tile down into submenu after submenu. You can witness this yourself through the sheer number of BIOS screenshots.

Standard BIOS options.

Advanced BIOS Features. As you can see here no actual setting can be tweaked. Its just a portal to numerous other submenus shown in the next screen captures.

IDE submenu.

USB submenu.

Super IO submenu.

AHCI submenu.

Smbios submenu.

MPS submenu.

As you can see many advanced tweaking options were available, but you have to browse through the constant submenus to configure them.

Advanced Chipset Settings where you can configure Northbridge and Southbridge options. However, as you can see more submenus must be accessed before any settings can be manipulated.

NB submenu.

SB submenu.

Available PCI/PNP Settings.

Boot settings Menu.

Power management tab.

The Fox Central Control Unit is where most of the overclocking options are located. The amount of tweakablitly is impressive. This lead to the board posting a very good OC as I will get into later in the article, but once again navigation of several submenus is required.

CPU submenu.

Memory Timing submenu.

Voltage Control submenu.

The maxium values I could select using my test setup.

Expansive fan control settings are also available in the hardware Health section.

Whew thats it for the BIOS section, now lets test out this board.