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The
Foxconn 875A02-6EKRS Motherboard |
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Something a Little Different |
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The Board:
The Foxconn
875A02 is a sharp looking motherboard, built on a blue PCB.
Equipped with the Intel 875P Northbridge and ICH5R
Southbridge, this board offers support for the latest
components available, including Intel's Prescott Pentium 4.
The board has 4 DIMM slots that supports a total
capacity of 4GB of DDR memory and offers Dual-Channel
capability. The CPU socket is surrounded by an ample
collection of capacitors aimed at conditioning and
stabilizing the voltage being provided to the CPU. We
did find that the capacitors were a bit close to the cooler
frame, and even managed to catch the top of the lower center
capacitor when mounting the cooler. We liked the
placement of the ATX power connectors, which helped to keep the
power cabling far from the CPU cooler. Once again,
however, we found capacitors precariously close, this time
to the main power connector. There was a large capacitor butted
up against the right edge of the connector and the lower
capacitor was a little close to our thumb when releasing the
locking mechanism. These are
not tremendous issues, but care should be taken to be very
deliberate with each move or you may inadvertently knock a
capacitor off.
The board comes with 5 PCI slots
for plenty of expansion as well as an AGP 3.0 compliant slot
to accommodate an AGP video card. The 875A02 sports
two RAID controllers, first the integrated RAID in the ICH5R
Southbridge and a Silicon 3112A controller from Silicon
Image. Each controller offers two SATA RAID connections
while IDE RAID support has been abandoned altogether. Instead the
board is equipped with two standard IDE connectors
supporting a
total of 4 drives as well as one floppy connection for
legacy support.
The backside of the board holds
a nice collection of inputs and outputs. Along with
legacy support for PS2, Parallel and Serial connections, the
board comes equipped with a total of 4 USB 2.0 ports, an
IEEE1394 port, an RJ-45 connector to provide gigabit Ethernet and an
audio header. The Audio header includes Line-In,
Line-Out and Microphone ports driven by the ALC650 AC'97
CODEC, that can reconfigure the three ports for 6 channel
output. Headers are provided for S/PDIF, Aux-In and
CD-In as well as one for a front mounted audio connection.
The board also has an additional header for another
IEEE1394 connector, but Foxconn does not include the
additional hardware necessary to fully utilize the IEEE1394 header nor
was a S/PDIF connector included.
The Bios:
Bringing all of the system
components to life was a custom version of the popular
Phoenix-AwardBIOS. The initial setup screen looked
very familiar, however, as we dug deeper, we found this
configuration to be less common. The first, and most
notable option we came across was Foxconn's SuperBoot
preference. SuperBoot was designed to reduce the boot
time of the motherboard by streamlining the POST process.
Instead of polling each component on boot, once a successful
boot has occurred, the settings are held in CMOS and
accessed during subsequent re-boots. This seems
like an intriguing option, as with SuperBoot enabled, we shaved
roughly 5 seconds off of the boot time. While this was
a relatively small improvement, we found it odd that with
special attention being given to speeding up the boot process, we did
not find any way to disable the Silicon Image RAID
controllers in the BIOS. This means that every time we
booted, the controller was active and searched for drives
every time. Being able to disable the RAID controller
if it's not being used, would help decrease boot times by
roughly
10 seconds or more when combined with SuperBoot.
In the same section we found the
ability to adjust the system bus for overclocking.
Sadly, this option was severely limited to a top setting of
233MHz. We say sadly because the Pentium 4's of today
have so much headroom that this board doesn't let you take
full advantage of the additional CPU power.
Nonetheless, a 33MHz increase does equate to a 16.5% gain
which is pretty good, but we would have liked to see 250MHz
be the top setting at a minimum. What we also found was
there were no voltage settings available in the
Frequency/Voltage Control section to tweak performance.
Naturally, with such a low range of bus speeds available,
the omission of voltage settings is less of an issue since
stress on components is at a minimum even at the maximum
setting for this board. However, some high performance
memory modules on the market benefit from a slight increase
in voltage, a setting that was missing with this
motherboard.
We were glad to see Foxconn
offered a good selection of memory performance options in
the Advanced Chipset Features. The memory timings were
manually configurable or could be set automatically by the
SPD. When
configured manually, the CAS setting ranged from CAS 2, 2.5
and 3. The Active Precharge ranged from 5 to 8 in
increments of 1 and both the DRAM RAS to CAS and DRAM RAS to
Discharge could be set to 4, 3 or 2. The memory
frequency could be adjusted to Auto or manually locked to
run at DDR 266, 320 or 400.
Lastly we found the PC Health
Status window that gave some insight as to the state of the
system's critical voltages and temperatures. A CPU
Warning could be configured if desired to let the user know
if the CPU was running too hot, and a Shutdown Temperature
could be set to automatically shut off the machine if the
CPU temperature became too excessive. While this is most
useful with overclocking, if the CPU cooler was to
malfunction, these settings could save the processor from
being damaged, especially if the system was running
unattended.
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Overclocking with the
Foxconn 875A02-6EKRS Motherboard |
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Limited Options |
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We were mildly
disappointed with the limited range in bus speed available
with the 875A02, especially since our particular Pentium 4-C at 2.4GHz has
demonstrated amazing gains in a number of reviews.
Nonetheless, this wasn't going to keep us from trying.
To demonstrate our point, we started out by raising the bus to the maximum setting of
233MHz. and had no trouble getting the system to POST.
However, once
Windows started to load the system would BSOD and reboot
spontaneously.
This was because the memory was still set for DDR400, which
would result in an overclocked speed of 466MHz, well beyond
our DIMM's capabilities. So we dropped the memory
setting to DDR320 allowing us to boot into Windows without
error while appreciating fair gains from overclocking.
In the end, we managed to hit a peak CPU speed of 2.79GHz., which
equals a gain of 16.25%. While this processor can go
much higher, this is a respectable amount of additional
horsepower.
Next we'll run a
series of benchmarks to assess the board's overall
performance. In each test we will include results at
stock and overclocked speeds to demonstrate the effects of
the increased bus speed on the system.
Time For Sandra & Futuremark's Finest
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