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

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!

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

Standard affair that we’ve come to see from Foxconn. Well presented and functional.

The Board

Foxconn have used the same sexy (yes I did just use the word “sexy” in a review) styling for their P55 motherboards as they did for the X58 motherboards. Black and red just work together so well and make it look like a classy piece of kit.

The board features three PCI-E 16x physical slots, and no NF200 chip which means you’ll get the best possible performance out of your single card and dual card setup with 16x PCI-E2.0 and 2x 8xPCI-E2.0 respectively.  It supports a third card in the lower black PCI-E slot, but this is limited to 4x PCI-E2.0 so would only be suitable for a low end graphics, PhysX or RAID card.

An 8-phase hybrid PWM circuit of DirectFET MOSFETs supplies the Core voltage while a 2-phase circuit supplies the Uncore voltage. The DDR3 voltage is also supplies bya  2-phase circuit.

On the side of the board we can see the voltage read points which first appeared on the BloodRAGE and it is good to see a few more added for this board. Also on this pic we can see the space where the “Fuzzy Equalizer” feature would be on the Inferno Katana board. This shows the number of active phases in use by the CPU at any time. It works together with the new i-Tweaker logic chip.

Video Tour:

BIOS

Foxconn have had to move from the Phoenix Award BIOS they have become used to on the BlackOps and BloodRAGE boards to an AMI (American Megatrends) BIOS for the Inferno Katana. This means that things are done in a slightly different way to normal for someone like me who is used to an Award BIOS. That being said, I am quickly getting used to it and it’s not all that bad.

Test System:

Foxconn Inferno Katana GTI (P02 BIOS)
Intel Core i7 870 LGA 1156 Engineering Sample
4GB Corsair Dominator GT DDR3 RAM
nVidia Geforce 9500GT
Antec TPQ-1KW

Evocarlos’ single stage rotary phase.

Intel TurboTech:

One ace that these P55 boards have up their sleeve is Intel’s Turbo Modes for the CPUs which are an extension of EIST. Simply with a stock BIOS, the CPU will adjust it’s multiplier on-the-fly to give you the best performance. Here’s a little table showing what happens with the Core i7 870 with Turbo disabled:

With Turbo enabled:

These are the potential multiplers and speeds that the CPU can automatically achieve, given a set of conditions are met. The CPU must be operating with temperature, current and power draw limits. If any one of these limits are exceeded, the CPU will drop to a lower multiplier until within the limits again. This is really good news gor us as extra multiplier mean the potential to overclock higher as we can overcome a potential motherboard limitation, but also because it gives us much more flexibility on the DDR3 multiplier.

Tests and Results:

For an early BIOS, the board is doing very well. Overclocking on this board really couldn’t be simpler, there are only two voltages to increase to achieve 90% of what the board can offer. CPU Vcore and CPU VTT can be increased as and when each one is needed. For the other two voltages, the CPU PLL can actually be reduced for less stress on the CPU down to 1.7v from 1.8v. Lastly, the PCH voltage can be increased from 1.05 to 1.10-1.15 when overclocking above 4Ghz for some added stability.

Due to a couple of reasons, one being simply time, and secondly the lack of a Windows tool to adjust the bclk, I wasn’t able to get the maximum performance possible out of this board. I’d be willing to put money on being able to get to 220bclk with setfsb or an equivalent, as the system could fully boot and run SuperPi 32M at 215.

CPU-Z:

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=720254

Bclk:
215

Potential for a lot higher, lack of setfsb limits

SuperPi 1M:

201×24=4820Mhz
Hwbot #4

Pifast:
198×24=4756Mhz
Hwbot #4

SuperPi 32M:
198×24=4756Mhz

wPrime 32M:
210×22=4624Mhz

wPrime 1024M:
208×22=4581Mhz
Hwbot #5

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 Inferno Katana GTI is a very easy board to use. The new BIOS layout is a breath of fresh air and overclocking involves just two voltages.

One thing the BIOS/board is lacking is an override for the Intel Turbo mode, if we had a “Current Feedback Override” like there is available on the BloodRAGE then it would be possible to force a 24x mutli for 4 cores, 26 multi for 2 core and a 27 multi for 1 core all the time, rather than it dropping to a lower multi under large current/power draw. I’ll write this one off as there’s only the one BIOS available, but this is something that needs to be in the next release.

In gereral, the board was extremely well behaved, and the overclock recovery worked fine every time. That being said, it would be nice to be told when it had recovered, and have it pause on the POST screen rather than boot to Windows only to realise it was at stock speeds.

Like I mentioned in the Flaming Blade GTI review before, this board overvolts the DDR3 and this time by 0.04v. I’m slightly disappointed to see this get worse with this board, especially with the Elpida “Hyper” kits dropping left right and centre, you’d think Foxconn could have this undervolting rather than over.

Conclusion

Foxconn might just be onto a real winner with this motherboard. We’re yet to hear what the final pricing will be, and actually whether it will be coming to all the global markets, but with some good news on those two fronts there’s nothing to stop this from being a serious contender for your hard-earned and well-saved money that wasn’t spent on a LGA1136 i7 rig.

While this GTI version doesn’t come with a few of the more fancy features of the non-GTI Inferno Katana like the Fuzzy Equalizer, extra 4-phase CPU PWM and Force Reset button, I think it offers the more sensible approach to a Lynnfield-based setup. P55 rigs will be built around price/performance parts and Foxconn have done right by this board.

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.

By r1ch.

Here’s hoping this is as big a deal as it promises to be. First, the boring but oh-so-required legal bit.

NEITHER I, NOR BENCHTEC ACCEPT ANY RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR ACTIONS. I, WE, NOR FOXCONN WILL WARRANTY THIS MODIFICATION. IF YOU KILL YOUR BOARD YOU ONLY HAVE YOURSELF TO BLAME.

You’ll need to remove the heatsink assembly, and just to the right of the X58 chipset  you’ll find the following resistors.

Remove resistor from R128 and solder onto R125.

Before:

After:

The Foxconn BloodRAGE has taken some stick from early reviews, some justifiable, some just outright insulting. These reviews were based on immature BIOS’s and an apparent hard limit of 220 bclk, which at the time put the board toward the back of the pack in terms of overall satisfaction.

What this mod promises is something that is new to the BloodRAGE and that’s an open PCI-E clock range. Testing so far has taken the PCI-E from a fixed 100Mhz on early BIOS’s to 103Mhz using the G25 BIOS and now with this mod, I’ve just booted at 119Mhz and SetFSB to 120Mhz. As you’ll see from the desktop, this is my daily rig install so I’ve not gone past 120Mhz for the sole risk of SATA HDD corruption – it may well go further.

Ignore the CPU Mhz, I run 220×12 daily (need a better heatsink that isn’t a SS Phase) and dropped back to 133 Bclk for PCI-E testing.

Just 103Mhz opened up the bclk from a 220 hard limit to 229 with my i7 920 C0 stepping, this is looking good to finally take it over 230 – more testing to follow.

So, feel free to try it and report back in this forum thread. I’d be interested to hear how this mod helps you.

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!

Specifications:

• The latest motherboard the Quantum Force segment,based on Intel® X58 chipset
• Supports Intel® Core™ i7 and i7 Extreme processors with Intel® QPI technology
• 4*PCle2.0 x16 slots with ATI CrossFireX™ and NVIDIA SLI™ support
• 3 channel DDR3 memory suppprt up to 1800MHz(O.C.)
• Quantum Power- advanced motherboard power system including 14 phase Hybrid PWM and DirectFET™ MOSFET technology
• 4in1 Quantum Cooler provides unique modular NB/SB/VRM cooling solution with inter-changeable NBcooling adaptors for air,water or extreme cooling
• SONAR X-Fi audio card provides outstanding audio fidelity and supports the latest gaming sound effects
• Bundled QF Panel for quick & easy overclocking from case-mounted 5 1/4 drive bay device
• Quantum BIOS provides new features and enhancements for overclocking including context-driven menus
• Serial Attached SCSI interface brings high-performance storage solutions to desktop PCs

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

Pretty standard packaging, it’s going to stand out on a shop shelf nicely.

The Board

Wow, what can you say? That has to be one of the best looking motherboards I’ve ever seen. Anything with a black PCB looks good to start with, but I love red and it just tops it off. Other manufacturers take note, 2 or 3 colours MAXIMUM to a motherboard please!

Video Tour:

Results:

Check the results thread here:

http://www.benchtec.co.uk/forums/showpost.php?p=41459&postcount=25