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Foxconn Flaming Blade Motherboard Review
Author: William West
Published: Monday, October 05, 2009
Board Layout and Features
The Quantum Force Flaming Blade comes with 2 full 16x PCI-Express 2.0 slots that supports both SLI or Crossfire video card configurations. Given the power of modern video cards we suspect that 2 will be more than enough for most gamers out there. PCIe slots are marked in sexy red while smaller PCIe and PCI slots can be found in black.
Foxconn has provided a single 1x PCI-Express slot at the top and single 4x PCI-Express slot between the video cards. 2x PCI slots fill out the remainder of the layout. The spacing and placement of these expansion card slots are well thought out to allow easy video card access.
Foxconn has provided a single 1x PCI-Express slot at the top and single 4x PCI-Express slot between the video cards. 2x PCI slots fill out the remainder of the layout. The spacing and placement of these expansion card slots are well thought out to allow easy video card access.
First thing to notice is the ability to use a LGA 775 heatsink. For those wanting to save some money or reuse your 775 water block this is a great feature. The downfall is that your heatsink had better be ready to dissipate at least 130watts or you might as well use the OEM cooler.
The Flaming Blade uses a 6-phase Hybrid PWM to feed the processor compared to the monster 14-phase hybrid PWM found on the BloodRage. You get a smaller amount of power regulation, but for the most part it is enough to keep the normal overclocker very happy and humming along.
Here you can see the 2-phase PWM that is feeding the Northbridge chipset, there is also a 2-phase PWM to feed the RAM as well.
In a strange turn of events the upper right portion of the Flaming Blade contains a bunch of core functionality. Here we have the 24-pin power connector, CMOS battery, CMOS clear jumper, and Force reset. The Force reset is a neat option that changes the ram setting back to SPD in the event you cannot boot your system, it's also handy if you ever swap ram and forget to change the ram settings.
One familiar feature found on both the Flaming Blade and BloodRage is the 3 RAM slots. This is a limiting factor in terms of memory expandability however this is a minor aspect since most everyone can get by with 6 to 12gigs of memory on a daily bases. The reason behind this is mainly to help the signal integrity while overclocking.
