Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H Motherboard Review

The layout of this motherboard is very well designed with quite a bit of detail given to making room for two monster video cards. Of course if you don't have two monster video cards you'll get to use the abundance of expansion slots otherwise you'll likely be down to a single 1x PCI Express slot and one regular PCI. Being that this board comes with most everything that any average user will use there is little need for lots of expandability.

Of course the upper section of the motherboard is following a typical "Intel" layout with the Northbridge chip in close proximity to the processor which in turn is close to the main system memory.

In going with the scenario of having two monster video cards you'll be happy to know that the video card slots are located away from the memory so that modules can be inserted and removed without having to remove the video card. Surprisingly enough there are still motherboard designers that don't feel to include this little convenience.

In taking a tour around the Foxconn 975X7AB we begin to notice some "trends" in the Foxconn designs but nothing out of the ordinary. For instance the past 3 motherboards we have looked they have all featured a dual PCI Express video system and all three have featured the same configuration and color scheme. Memory slots have always been located along the right near the power and PATA connections and they even manage to squeeze in 2 legacy PCI slots towards the bottom of the motherboard.

I always joke about being a little nostalgic and running two PCI Express cards in Crossfire mode and then pass everything thru a pair of Voodoo2 cards for some hot SLI² action. I'm not saying that doing so would actually do much, but hey it might be some good party fun.

Turning our attention to the "southern" section of the Foxconn 975X7AB you will find the Intel ICH7R Southbridge chip that handles all of the interconnects between HDD, USB, Expansion slots, etc.. The chip supports SATA II (300MB/s) and RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 0+1 (or 10).

Intel has been doing their best to try and remove some of the older legacy features such as AC'97 audio and Parallel ATA (IDE) from their Southbridge chips. This really causes a problem for most of us since hard drives are really the only storage device that has gained mainstream SATA acceptance. Luckily the ICH7R still has a single PATA channel and support for 2 devices.

This is also where the JMicron controller chip comes in to play by adding a second PATA channel and support for another 2 IDE devices. As an added benefit the controller also supports RAID in levels 0,1, and JBOD. For all purposes we can view this as an onboard RAID option like the Silicon Image or Promise controllers we've seen in the past.

As the Foxconn 975X7AB supports the Core 2 Duo line of processors we decided it would be best to see what all the fuss is about. So you can expect to see the performance differences between a dual core Pentium D and the Core 2 Duo. Here are a couple of shots of the processor before it gets locked down.