FOXCONN 975X7AB-8EKRS2H Motherboard Review

A Fox or a Hound?

There are a lot of motherboards out there that are just dying to be the new home for your new Core 2 Duo processor. You can go to any online retailer and find a multitude of boards out there that will fit your build, personality, and budget. A quick trip to Newegg alone will give you hundreds of choices to make: purple or black PCB, ATX or mAtx form factor, and anywhere from to $100- $250 as a price (WOW! ECS and Biostar for $250!). It is just incredible the amount of motherboards available out there… and that is just for the Intel s775 family of processors. Just amazing if you ask me!

Foxconn has been in the game for a long time, so they certainly are no stranger to the market (Or the game for that matter). Today we have the opportunity to look at one of their s775 boards that sports the Intel 975X chipset. With a street price of $159.99 plus shipping, it is certainly not a cheap board, so let’s take a look and see if this offering from Foxconn is worth your hard earned dollars. First off, a quick look at the specs…

SPECS:

Processor:	Intel Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Duo(Conroe), Pentium EE, Pentium D, Pentium 4 processors, Socket T (LGA775
Chipset:	Intel 975X + Intel ICH7R
Front Side Bus:	1066 / 800 MHz FSB
Memory	Dual channel DDR2 800 (OC) / 667 /533 x 4 DIMMs, Max 8GB
VGA on Die:	N/A
Expansion Slots:	2 x PCIe x16 ( CrossFire compatible ), 2 x PCIe x1, 2 x PCI
IDE:	1 x ATA 133, 1 x ATA 100
Serial ATA(SATA)/RAID:	5 x Serial ATA II w / RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5
Audio:	7.1 channel, Realtek ALC 882 (HDA)
LAN:	Dual GbE LAN, Dual Marvell 88E8056 (PCIe)
IEEE1394:	2 x 1394a, TI TSB43AB22APDT ( one pin header and one rear port)
Back Panel I/O Ports:	1 set 7.1 channel Audio jack (6 jacks) 1 x 1394a 1 x PS/2 keyboard 1 x PS/2 mouse 1 x parallel 1 x External SATA 4 x USB 2.0 2 x RJ45 1 x S/PDIF Coaxial out 1 x S/PDIF Fibre out
Internal I/O Connectors:	2 x USB 2.0 headers support 4 ports 1 x Front audio header 1 x S/PDIF out header 1 x IrDA header 1 x CD-IN header 1 x AUX-IN header 1 x Front panel header 1 x Buzzer 1 x COM2 1 x IEEE 1394a 1 x speaker
BIOS Features:	FWH 4MB, ACPI 2.0b, APM 1.2, PnP 1.0a, SMBIOS 2.3, USB 2.0
Support CD:	Drivers, DirectX, Adobe Reader, Super Utility, Norton Internet Security
Standards/Manageability:	PCI 2.3, USB2.0, DMI 2.0
Special Features:	SuperRecovery, SuperBoot,SuperBIOS-Protect, SuperStep, Fox Live Update, Ratio Free, Fox Intelligent Stepping, Fox One
Form Factor:	ATX (12 x 9.6)

Ok, now that the introduction is done, let’s get a closer look at the board and see if it is a Fox of a board when it comes to performance or if it is a dog!