The capacitors found on the Foxconn motherboard are TEAPO, Rubycon and KZJ branded. Chipset cooling is serious business now, and the passive heatsinks used on the Foxconn 945P7AA-8EKRS2 are huge.

Both Northbridge and Southbridge heatsinks are replaceable should you go and try your luck. Even though the Northbridge heatsink only uses two mounting hooks, Foxconn equips the motherboard with four which means it is compatible with more exotic forms of cooling. During testing both Northbridge and Southbridge heatsinks got quite warm.

Whether you are using the onboard IDE RAID controller or running a RAID array on the ICH7R Southbridge, Foxconn has you covered when installing Windows. These days few manufacturers include driver diskettes anymore and nothing is more frustrating than having a system install fail because the OS was not able to find the HDDs. That is certainly not a problem with the Foxconn 945P7AA-8EKRS2 motherboard which has two 3.5" floppies pre-loaded with the necessary drivers.

Overclocking the Foxconn Motherboard

Overclocking Results:

stock max. oc motherboard speed: 200 mhz 254 mhz if you're new to Overclocking and not sure what to do, check out these two excellent Guides for some pointers: Overclocking the CPU and Memory Overclocking the Videocard

In the overclocking portion of our tests, we increased the speed in ~10 MHz intervals, and from the outset the Foxconn 945P7AA-8EKRS2 seemed up to the challenge. At 230 MHz the motherboard started to give us a few problems and the system would occasionally not POST or BSOD while loading Windows. Increasing the System Core Voltage (chipset) an additional 0.15V solved that hiccup.

At 240 MHz the processor finally had enough on stock voltages and required more before it would overclock any further. Increasing the CPU voltage 0.15V was the necessary dose. The motherboard was able to reach the 250 MHz plateau and I was a bit surprised that the Thermaltake Jungle 512 CPU HSF could handle a Pentium D running at 4 GHz!

In the end the motherboard max'd out at an overclock of 254 MHz, anything higher and the system would crash at random. I believe the board actually has more headroom in it and that it was the processor limiting things. In any case it is nice to see that the Foxconn motherboard can take some pretty heavy overclocking.