Foxconn Inferno Katana P55 Motherboard Review

Inferno Katana comes with a monster 14 phase hybrid PMW.  12 phases are dedicated to the CPU while the remaining 2 supply power to the memory sockets.  Overclocking demands proper power distribution to ensure a successful overclock.  Under normal conditions less than half of the PMW will ever be utilized.  In fact the extra power phases won't get much use until you introduce subzero cooling methods and extremely high processor speeds.

The Intel P55 chipset is designed for the 1156 Core i7 and i5 processors.  People are often confused when it comes to the Core i7 since it is available in two socket formats.  Both Core i7's feature quad core designs, hyperthreading and an integrated memory controllers.  The differences with them begin with that memory controller.  Socket 1156 features a dual channel controller while the 1366 counterpart comes with a triple channel monster. Some of the other differences include 16x lanes of PCI Express and a more robust turbo controller.

Foxconn has included 2x DDR3 memory banks that together support up to 16GB of memory.  Officially Inferno Katana supports up to 1800Mhz memory modules but during our tests 2000Mhz modules performed flawlessly.

Inferno Katana comes with 3 16x PCI Express video card slots, 2 1x PCI Express slots and a single PCI slot.  The configuration will allow up to 3 video cards to be installed, provided one of the cards comes equipped with a single slot cooler.    The topmost red PCIe slots will have a full 16x lanes of PCIe bandwidth if a single card is installed.  For multi GPU configurations the available lanes will be split with 8x lanes allocated to each slot.  The black 16x slot at the bottom of the board has 4x lanes available which is perfect for a PhysX processor or hardware RAID controller.

Extra USB connectors are located across the bottom of the motherboard along with the CMOS Clear jumper and audio related connections.