| 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 |
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.
