| Article Index |
|---|
| Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H Motherboard Review |
| Page 2 - On the Board |
| Page 3 - Performance - 3D/PCMark |
| Page 4 - SiSoft Sandra |
| Page 5 - Conclusion |
| All Pages |
Today we check out Foxconn’s 975X7AB-8EKRS2H motherboard. While it’s very well priced and
highly featured, we see if it has the performance to make it a real winner.
Introduction:
The Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H motherboard uses the Intel 975X chipset coupled with the ever reliable Intel ICH7R Southbridge chipset, so performance is bound to be solid at least, with support for the latest quad core CPUs with 1066Mhz Front-Side-Bus, so it won’t limit your CPU choice at all when you’re putting together your next machine.
The rest of the 975X7AB’s specs are as follows:
- Dual Channel DDR2 533/667/800(in overclock) – 4 Slots
- Dual PCI-Ex16 Slots – Crossfire Compatible
- 2 x PCI-Ex1 Slots, 2 x PCI
- 2 x IDE ATA Ports, 4 x SATA-II Ports (RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5)
- 7.1 Channel Realtek HDA Audio
- 8 x USB 2.0 Ports
- Dual GigLAN
- Back panel Ports – 6 x Audio, 4 x USB, Firewire, S/PDIF Digital Audio (Coaxial + Optical), eSATA, 2 x RJ45 LAN, Parallel, 2 x PS/2
The 975X7AB has all these features on a standard ATX size 12” x 9.6” board, which will fit in just about any midi-tower case or larger.
On The Board:
On the board itself, the PCB is packed full of connectors wherever space is available, most notable is the now very rare inclusion of two IDE channels (1 x ATA100, 1 x ATA133), allowing four old style IDE drives to be used in the system, most boards these days only keep one IDE channel for use with optical drives, as it’s expected you’ll use Serial ATA these days for all of your Hard Drives. The inclusion of dual IDE channels is great for people who still have old IDE drives that have made their way through a few system upgrades over the years, I know I still have an old 200GB IDE drive in my beast at home, amongst all the other SATA drives, and it’s still useful, as will be the dual IDE ports on this board to many people.
There are only 4 x Serial ATA-II connectors on the 975X7AB, which may be industry standard, but is a little low for a board that is obviously aiming more towards the enthusiast market. 2 USB connectors are close by to the SATA ports for use with front or rear USB ports in your case, giving a total of 8 USB ports all up in the system, a Firewire connector is also included in addition to the Firewire port already on the rear I/O panel, as well as an audio connection header, which is again useful for front case connections.
The 975X7AB keeps many old-school connectors on its PCB, in addition to the dual IDE channels already mentioned, a parallel port is included as standard on the back panel, even though almost nothing uses it anymore, and there’s a header on the board below the (old) PCI slots for a 9-Pin serial port, there’s even an IR header up near the power connector, just about everything you could need, no matter how old it is, thankfully no ISA slots though, that’d just be silly. :)
One clever inclusion that I’ve always been a fan of on other boards is the addition of a power button on the board itself, which the 975X7AB has down in the bottom right hand corner. These are an excellent idea and make working on a board outside of a case (as we do here for testing, or what you’d be doing when diagnosing a fault) a lot easier, as you don’t have to find a pen or paperclip to connect the power switch header together, one slip and god knows what you’d touch.
As far as expansion slots go, the 975X7AB has 2 x PCI-Express X16 slots for dual video card support as well as support for ATI’s Crossfire technology, 2 PCI-Express x1 slots are also included for the growing range of expansion cards appearing in the market supporting this connection, as well as 2 x old style PCI slots. As just about everything you could need (except for video) is built-in to the board, it’d be hard to imagine all these slots ever being completely filled with expansion cards, but it’s good to know they’re there if you need them.
There are 4 x 240Pin DDR2 memory slots supporting a maximum of 8GB of memory, with native support for speeds of 533Mhz and 667Mhz DDR2 RAM, and support for 800Mhz DDR2 when overclocked.
One area of the board that seems to be lacking is the fan connectors, the 975X7AB only has 2 auxiliary fan connectors. Or 3 if you count one that is already taken by the Northbridge fan. These connectors are also both located at the edge of the board closest to the front of the case, so not very helpful when trying to connect rear case fans in your system.
Performance:
The Test Setup:
- Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H Intel 975X Chipset Motherboard And
- ASUS P5N32-E SLI nVidia 680i Chipset Motherboard (for comparison)
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU
- Corsair 2GB (2 x 1GB) Twin2X PC2-8500 DDR2 Memory Kit
- Seagate 250GB Barracuda 7200.10 SATA-II HDD
- Inno3D GeForce 7950GT PCI-Ex16 512MB Video Card
- Antec Basiq 500W ATX PSU
As you can see from above we will be comparing the Foxconn 975X7AB against an nVidia 680i chipset motherboard, the ASUS P5N32-E SLI. They will be put through a range of CPU, memory and graphics benchmarks.
Firstly 3DMark06:
The 3DMark06 test shows there is an almost negligible difference between the two boards, but the Foxconn does come out slightly in front. The only noticeable difference in the 3DMark06 tests was in the CPU tests, with the Foxconn edging slightly ahead, while all other tests were more or less equal.
Next PCMark05:
PCMark05 shows a different story to 3DMark, with the Foxconn lagging slightly behind the ASUS board. The majority of the PCMark tests showed an ever so slight favour towards the ASUS board, but the most notable was the memory latency test (13.2 Million Accesses/s for the ASUS vs. 11.4 for the Foxconn), hopefully the next few tests will help shed some light on what areas of the boards are causing these differences.
Next SiSoft Sandra:
We ran several CPU and memory specific tests through SiSoft Sandra, the first of which is a CPU arithmetic test:
Again we see only a slight difference, but in this case the ASUS has come out on top in both tests, showing a slight advantage in raw mathematical processing power.
The next test is another CPU test, testing multimedia instruction sets.
Again we see a slight advantage for the ASUS board in both tests.
The next test compares the speed of the CPU’s Cache and Memory subsystems, and the results were quite surprising.
The Foxconn board and its Intel 975X chipset are clearly much faster here, which helps to explain the performance gain the Foxconn had in the 3DMark06 CPU tests. All our tests are run twice to ensure accuracy, but we ran this one a few more times on each just to be sure as we were quite surprised at the difference.
The next benchmark from SiSoft tests the efficiency of the Multi-Core CPU by testing the bandwidth speed between the cores (higher = better), as well as the inter-core latency (lower = better).
Again we see a very clear advantage for the Foxconn motherboard with an increase in bandwidth speed of around 14% over the ASUS, and the ASUS being over 30% slower in latency. This means multithreaded applications should have much better performance on the Foxconn/Intel 975X combo compared to the ASUS/nVidia combination motherboard.
The next test is memory (RAM) bandwidth.
This test shows what we were talking about in the PCMark05 test, the ASUS has quite a distinct advantage in memory speed, almost 10% faster than the Foxconn, which is a massive difference.
Conclusion:
The Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H motherboard is packed full of features and has nearly every type of connection you could ever need, even some quite old ones. We haven’t had a chance to explore the 975X7AB’s overclocking features, which at a glance look very decent indeed, but they don’t seem to be backed up with cooling capability with only 2 aux fan connectors (compared to the 7 found on the ASUS for example) and as such is a bit of a disappointment in that area.
The Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H sells online for around AU$230, and for the money you get excellent features and very reasonable performance, with the 975X7AB showing excellent performance when Multi-Core CPU’s are utilised, however lacking somewhat in memory speed compared to the popular nForce 680i chipset as we’ve seen today. So its performance is a bit of a compromise of fast CPU, but slow memory, but overall quite a good package.
OzHardware Rating – 8.5/10
This product can be purchased online at www.techbuy.com.au (Direct Link)
