Let’s take a look at Foxconn’s cheapest X58 motherboard and see if it can hold it’s own against the big boys.

First up, let’s let Foxconn introduce themselves and the Quantum Force line up:

Amen! That sort of mission statement is exactly what we’re after here at BenchTec, a committment to enthusiasts and overclockers to produce the sorts of motherboard we dream of…hopefully!

There’s been a few unsubstantiated rumours flying round about Foxconn’s Quantum Force division, suggesting that it’s closing down and they won’t be making or supporting motherboards soon. That’s simply not true folks, QF will have a couple of new P55 motherboards (called the Infernal Katana) and there’s more to come after that.

Specifications:

Now if specifications aren’t your sort of thing I’ll move swifty on to the retail packaging and the board itself. Here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for…

Packaging

Nice box, colourful, interesting. That’s about all you can say about the box!

The Board

Oh yes, Foxconn kept the same red and black colour scheme for their budget board that they did for their premium BloodRAGE. This is a big plus for the motherboard in my opinion, it’s a shame other manufacturers spoil the appearance of cheap boards with dull brown PCBs. The board also has the same ‘quality’ feel to it like the BloodRAGE.

Video Tour:

BIOS:

FlamingBlade Bios:

It seems like it is possible to flash the non-GTI FlamingBlade BIOS to this board. I suspect this will unlock SLI for the board and can now see the little SLI logo in the corner of the splash screen. It also appears to unlock RAID for the board, but it only enables the option in the BIOS, you aren’t able to configure any RAID drives as this is obviously missing from the hardware. It also unlocks some hidden DIMM voltage options.

Test System:

Foxconn FlamingBlade GTI (P06 BIOS)
Intel Core i7 920 (C0 Stepping)
2GB A-DATA Vitesta Extreme Edition DDR3-1600 7-7-7-20
nVidia Geforce 9500GT
Antec TPQ-1KW

Vapochill LS Phase-Change unit.

Tests and Results:

Simply great results. This board matched the BloodRAGE clock-for-clock and out-clocked a full range of boards from MSI and Gigabyte as tested by other BenchTec reviewers.

I’ll say that again, just so it’s not missed. This board hit the highest benchable bclk for every benchmark that BenchTec reviewers have seen. Now, whether I’d recommend this over a board from MSI, Gigabyte or Asus depends on a  lot more factors than raw performance, but this is a very big tick in the performance column for Foxconn and I’m impressed.

CPU-Z:

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=635308

SuperPi 1M:
227×21=4771Mhz
BenchTec #1

Pifast:
228×21=4793Mhz
BenchTec #1

SuperPi 32M:
224×21=4708Mhz
BenchTec #1

wPrime 32M:
221×21=4644Mhz
BenchTec #1

wPrime 1024M:
218×21=4591Mhz
BenchTec #1

3DMark05:
224×21=4708Mhz
BenchTec #1

3DMark06:
217×21=4559Mhz
BenchTec #1

Usage:

One thing I like to do when I review a board is to talk a bit about how the board is to use. It’s my way of trying to convey all those aspects of using a motherboard that you don’t get from just screenshots and pictures.

The FlamingBlade GTI is a pretty well behaved board. I leave the word ‘pretty’ in due to a couple of niggles that I experienced. When upping the PCI-E Frrequency over a certain amount, whenever the board rebooted, it would hang on the debug LED code “PP” and then kick in the overclock recovery. I wasn’t able to find out exactly where in the PCI-E scale this happened, but it could be down to a bad solder job as I needed to mod the board to go above 103Mhz. Don’t fret though, new retail boards don’t need this mod so you may not even see this issue.

The last thing is that this board overvolts the DDR3 by about 0.03v. Not a huge amount, but with reports of Elpida “Hyper” memory modules being extremely sensitive, giving them 1.68v when you think you’ve within the 1.65v limit is a little concern. That being said, now you know, you can happily set 1.62v in the BIOS and rest easy.

Conclusion

When you take a manufacturer’s bottom-end board, priced aggresively and gunning for the builder-on-a-budget, you expect to scraping the barrel with regards to good things to say about it. This board thoroughly surprised and pleased me. It’s built and works in the same way as the top of the range BloodRAGE and it performs equally as well.

The lack of RAID is something worth pointing out, but there’s the non-GTI FlamingBlade for that if you need. SLI is supported (unofficially) as well as Crossfire (officially), and the spacing between the slots is perfect for a two-card setup allowing the top card to breathe. Also, on-board power, reset and clear CMOS buttons would make things a heck of a lot easier. That being said, I only needed to clear the CMOS once, the overclock recovery works very well.

I’d recommend this board to anyone building an i7 system, and as long as P55 boards don’t severely undercut it in price, the triple channel DDR3 should keep it ahead in the benchmarks. There’s also future planning with Intel’s 6-core CPU’s rumoured to be just around the corner and only supporting the X58 chipset, these will be just a BIOS update away.