Foxconn 755A01-6EKRS Motherboard

Content Creation and Business Winstone 2004 Multimedia and Workstation Performance Testing

For our last round of tests we ran both Content Creation Winstone 2004 and Business Winstone 2004.  Each application gauges a system's overall performance with workstation and multimedia applications.  Content Creation 2004 tests multimedia intensive applications, while Business Winstone 2004 compares performance with common workstation applications.  Below is a list of the programs each test uses to calculate its final score.

If you recall back in the PCMark04 section, we saw a marked drop in hard drive performance with the SiS755 compared to VIA's K8T800.  If there was ever a benchmark that is affected by hard drive performance, it's PC Mag's Winstone Test Suite.  As you can see, there was nothing getting in the way of the Foxconn 755A01.  We saw an average of a 1 point advantage in Content Creation Winstone 2004 and 1.3 in Business Winstone.  This may not sound like much, but it adds up to 3.1% and 5.8%, respectively.

This is our second go around with a Foxconn motherboard.  By designing boards that are well thought out and can compete with the big name brands in performance and features, we feel Foxconn is well on their way to gaining a foothold in the motherboard market.  Their BIOS engineers just need to enable a few more features.  We are impressed with their goal to offer unique options like SuperRecovery and SuperBoot, but these features are not enough in our opinion.  For one, we feel voltage adjustments are an absolute must, especially with regard to memory.  The lack thereof severely limits the user's options when high performance memory modules are involved.  Another shortcoming is the lack of D-Brackets needed to expand the USB and FireWire headers, since finding these items after market can sometimes be tough.  

With the aforementioned issues aside, we think the Foxconn 755A01-6EKRS to be a fine motherboard with a competitive feature set and top-end performance.  In almost all of our tests, the Foxconn 755A01-6EKRS took the lead, even in PCMark04, where the hard drive performance paled in comparison to the VIA based reference board.  We were also pleased with the overall design and layout.  Some of the system's proprietary features were quite useful while others were mediocre, but we like the direction in which Foxconn is headed.  They are trying to make some unique and useful options available to the end-user.

When we took into account the relatively poor overclocking options and no voltage settings and offset that with high-end performance, a quality design and solid feature set, we walked away with a favorable impression of the 755A01-6EKRS.  Ultimately, we think the lack of voltage settings is the biggest of all the issues and a serious one at that.  However, when you factor in the average retail price for this board falls in the $90 range, we think the Foxconn 755A01-6EKRS is a sweet deal for someone looking to piece together and Athlon 64 based system.

We give the Foxconn 755A01-6EKRS a HotHardware Heat Meter Rating of a 8