Just because we’re hardcore overclockers, doesn’t mean we don’t want to know what’s the best platform for a HTPC. r1ch takes a look at two boards from Foxconn for this.

We’ve previously looked at Foxconn’s Quantum Force range of boards for our reviews, including their BloodRAGE X58, Flaming Blade GTI X58 and Inferno Katana GTI P55 boards. Today we look at their more run-of-the-mill “Channel” business which is aimed at your everyday PC builder, offering value for money ahead of overclocking prowess.

As today’s review is going to be aimed at the HTPC crowd, overclocking isn’t going to the be-all and end-all of this review. All those other everyday considerations are going to come into it, while system cost will likely dictate what we choose.

Specifications:

The two Foxconn micro-ATX motherboards we’re going to be using today are the H55MX-S and Cinema II Deluxe boards based on the Intel H55 and AMD Socket AM3/785G chipset’s respectively.

Foxconn have done a good job of laying out the features and specifications on their website so I won’t bother copy-pasting.

H55MX-S

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/product/Motherboards/detail_overview.aspx?ID=en-us0000484

Cinema II Deluxe

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/product/Motherboards/detail_overview.aspx?ID=en-us0000472

It’s worth mentioning at this point that the Cinema II board comes from Foxconn’s “Digital Life” range of motherboards and is designed and marketed for the HTPC audience. The H55 board should achieve this as well, but isn’t marketed as such.

While the Cinema II Deluxe board provides connections for RGB, DVI and HDMI, the H55MX-S lacks the RGB port and offers the two more important DVI and HDMI.

Both offer 7.1 channel audio with an optical audio out option.

The Cinema II supports up to 4 sticks of DDR3 RAM, while the H55MX-S only accepts 2 sticks. The story is reversed for the SATA ports, 4 and 6 respectively.

The major difference is in the GPU platform. The Cinema II board sports ATI’s HD 4200 GPU whereas the H55MX-S will be relying on Intel’s latest “Clarkdale” range of CPU’s with integrated GPU. The Cinema II Deluxe also provides 128MB of DDR3 1333 sideport memory, which is dedicated to the HD 4200, providing a 20% extra performance according to Foxconn’s website.

Packaging

H55MX-S

Cinema II Deluxe

Both packages are fairly bargain basement. You get the board, a quick-start guide, a manual, a driver CD and a couple of SATA data cables.

The Board

H55MX-S

Cinema II Deluxe

One board certainly steals the show in terms of presentation here, and it’s not the easy-off-the-tongue H55MX-S. The Cinema II Deluxe board looks stunning with it’s black PCB and orange accents, perhaps even on a par with Foxconn’s Quantum Force range of board in the looks department.

Video Tour:

Foxconn H55MX-S tour:

Foxconn Cinema II Deluxe tour:

Test Systems:

While this is pairing an AMD Quad Core with an Intel Dual Core, the 661 has HyperThreading and the Phenom II is actually substatially cheaper.

BIOS:

H55MX-S

Cinema II Deluxe

Soon.

Tests and Results:

First up, let’s look at the SATA, USB, and DDR3 speeds using HDTach and Everest.

Not much to seperate these two at all, the drives themselves are most definitely the bottleneck here. Cinema II just edges it on the SATA performance.

For raw bandwidth the H55 platform wins with higher read and write speeds and only slightly losing out on the copy speed. Latency goes to the AM3 785G platform, by a considerable margin.

MPEG-4 HD decode is up next – Two sample MPEG-4 movie clips, in 720p and 1080p were played while using the Windows “perfmon” tool to log CPU utilisation. Media Player Classic was used with two registry settings to switch the GPU acceleration on and off.

The H55MX-S storms this, making light work of the HD decode. On both platforms the picture was clear and crisp over HDMI and the was no stutter or jitter to the picture or audio.

Windows Media Video (WMV) HD decode as well – Two sample WMV HD clips, in 720p and 1080p were played while using the Windows “perfmon” tool to log CPU utilisation. Media Player Classic was used with two registry settings to switch the GPU acceleration on and off.

Both systems handled the files with ease, although in both cases CPU utilisation by the audio driver was in the region of 4-5%. This may account for the lack of variation in results, but I suspect something was at fault for the Cinema II tests as identical results indicate an issue with enabling GPU acceleration.

This one surprised me. The Core i5 661’s 900Mhz IGP runs rings around the Cinema II’s HD 4200, even with the 128Mb DDR3 sideport memory. Faster in the DirectX9 3DMark03, and also much faster in DX10 – the “Entry” game tests were nearly twice as fast on the i5’s IGP.

Intel has always been strong in SuperPi and Pifast.

This one was also a turn up for the books. Intel’s faster clocked and HyperThreaded dual core edging out AMD’s native quad core. Turbo Boost ramps the 661 up to nearly 3.5Ghz through this multi-threaded test, adding 1Ghz per core over the Phenom II X4 805. With 7Ghz vs 10Ghz of total processing power, the AMD should still win on paper, but Hyperthreading and the improved clock-for-clock performance see the dual-core win this.

On the whole, the AMD platform gets pipped at every post, losing out in key areas such as HD decoding, gaming, single threaded and multi-threaded performance with the low memory latency it’s only significant ‘win’.

I can’t complete this review without owning up to a proper face-palm moment with the Cinema II Deluxe board. I completed this full set of testing, including screenshots and overclock with the board in single channel memory mode. Doh! My last AMD system was a S939 Athlon 64 3800+ and I’ve since had Intel which has made me ritually install memory in 1/3 or 2/4 slots. On this Foxconn board, and I’m assured all Foxconn boards, dual channel modules should go in the same coloured slots which in the Cinema II Deluxe’s case is 1/2 or 3/4. While I understand this might be better from a technical point of view with the signalling and latency, I would always prefer to see the 1/3 or 2/4 layout for compatibility and simply basic airflow reasons. The BIOS and/or motherboard traces can be designed to account for the technical aspects.

FoxOne:

Here is Foxconn’s FoxOne software. It looks identical for both systems but the H55 CD came with a slightly newer version. First up is the choice of 4 skins…

Moving swiftly on. Also featured is a range of frequency, voltage and fan adjustments with some monitoring. This is the only overclocking facility for the H55MX-S board and your options are limited to upping the bclk, which raises the core frequency and the memory frequency, or upping the memory frequency that ups the bclk as well…Yeah, they do the same thing.

Well, it’s a start. Those of you who read my Inferno Katana GTI review will see that Windows overclocking was something I specifically asked for and so, here it is. I just wish that these things didn’t need to be so garish and childish in their design. Way too much nowadays is made form over function.

Overclocking

H55MX-S

A quick bump of the bclk later, and at stock voltages we’re able to complete wPrime 1024 at 152×26, or 3950Mhz. This improves the wPrime time by 45 seconds.

Cinema II Deluxe

First up, some quick Everest benchmarks after two changes from defaults in the BIOS from Auto DDR3-1333 to DDR3-1600 and set CAS to 8.

Again, just the two changes from defaults in the BIOS for this one – bus speed to 252 which seemed to be the highest is was happy booting with at stock voltages and CAS to 8.

Leaving the CAS on Auto sets it to 11, but 250×12.5 gives a respectible quad core overclock of 3125Mhz. wPrime improves by a massive 90 seconds and finally puts it faster than the i5 661, even at 3950Mhz.

Last up, we’ve got the HD 420 overclocking. Again, this couldn’t be simpler – one option in the BIOS, just keep raising it until it stops working. 1059Mhz through 3DMark03 made for pleasant viewing, but sadly, even at over 1Ghz  it still couldn’t beat the 900Mhz IGP of the i5 661.

The Cinema II Deluxe board really was very simple to overclock and get that added extra bit of performance from. Bear in mind that heat was and will be an issue. I introduced a number of fans onto the board to provide airflow around the chipset and the PWM area.

Usage:

While I didn’t take temperature readings of the CPU/motherboard/chipset/etc during testing, the AMD system was noticeably hotter. I would like to have been able to say “warmer”, but the quad core produces more heat, the board PWM produces more heat and the chipset produces more heat. The Intel system, on the other hand, is noticeably “cooler”. No part of the board got particularly warm and the stock Intel cooler was more than sufficient.

If you’ve studied the Cinema II Deluxe’s BIOS screens well, you’ll notice that some of the options appear more than once. Changing one will change the other so there’s no problem with it as such, but I’m not sure what to make of this. On the one hand it might mean you find something quicker if you don’t know where you’re looking, but on the other hand, it’s duplication where it’s not needed and makes for a more cluttered BIOS.

While the FoxOne software is functional on both boards, it is somewhat generic and limited. Some of the displayed voltages can’t be adjusted and some of the overclocking frequencies can’t be adjusted. There isn’t an option for saving and loading profiles but there has been effort spent to include a number of themes that can be selected.

Both boards proved stable even on their shipping BIOS, working their way through the benchmark suite with ease and even handling some small overclock testing.

Conclusion:

The longer I spent with these two boards, the more I realised that their best use was actually very different.

The Foxconn AM3 785G board, with it’s support for BIOS overclocking, Quad core CPUs, 4 DIMM slots, ATI Hybrid graphics technology etc is best utilised as a small desktop PC, maybe where space is an issue, maybe where a user only wants one PC that can do everything including hooking up to their big-screen tele for HD video playback, fitting a discrete graphics card for some high resolution gaming on a monitor, and with a large amount of RAM supporting a multicore powerhouse AMD CPU. A student fits the bill perfectly, where they live out of the same room and everything is an arms length away.

The Foxconn H55 board is a bit more limited. There isn’t any overclocking options in the BIOS, there isn’t a quad core CPU with an IGP so you’re limited to a dual cores and there’s only 2 DIMM channels so you’re limited to the amount of RAM you can install. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it’s not a jack of all trades, it’s a master of one, which is being a HTPC and providing a cool, quiet, power efficient platform capable of handling HD playback on the big screen. This one is for the living room, sat in a small case next to the digital TV box and the AV receiver.

While on first impressions these two boards might have seemed destined for similar audiences, they do a much better job complementing Foxconn’s product line up than competing against each other.

Foxconn H55MX-S mATX H55 chipset motherboard

Foxconn Cinema II Dexlue mATX AM3 785G chipset motherboard