Foxconn has really come a long way to deliver affordable high end boards for the masses. 975X7AA-8EKRS2 is equipped with many goodies. The board itself supports the current Pentium D/4 and extreme edition processors and ATi CrossFire using Dual 8x PCIe slot.

Not only that, the board supports 1394, 4 SATA II port in RAID using the ICH7R south bridge which can be set up to run in  RAID 0,1,5,10 with the Intel ICH7R RAID controller. The SATA_5 port and external SATA port is controlled by the Sil3132 controller which can be configured to run in RAID 0 or 1. There is also an additional eSATA port for connecting to external SATA enclosure. The Dual GbE by Marvell 8055 and Realtek ALC882H 7.1 High Definition, redunandant BIOS enhances the board feature set. There is also RAIDm1 (Reliable Access in a Disk by mirror1) function that enables RAID 1 functionality in just one hard disk. There is also a BIOS backup function in case of bios boot failure or virus attack.

Performance wise, this board runs very fast and works very well even with the already o/c ASUS EN7600GT TOP card.  With the 3.8G P4 processor, the board runs fast when we set the mode to MANUAL or AUTO. Thanks to FOX ONE, it allows it to o/c the FSB automatically depending on the load. The system was a bit unstable though when we run it in Power Gaming mode. This might be due to the already o/c graphics card.

The overclocking features is rich on this board. The CPU Freq, PCIe, CPU vcore, memory freq, DRAM, FSB and MCH Termination voltage can all be adjusted. Some of the ranges are quite a shock to me. e.g. CPU Freq ranges from 200 to 600MHz!

The package comes with all the necessary cables and accessories. The documentation is clear with coloured slots for PCIe, ram slots, IDE sockets etc.

Overall the board is featured packed and it Fox One is definitely a good start to bring Foxconn to the same levels of the big boys.

Pricing (US)

Pricing (UK)

Discuss

Pros

• eSATA port
• SATA II
• HD Audio
• Dual GBe
• 1394

Cons

• One eSATA only
• Pentium Extreme edition 955 not supported (Update : Latest BIOS will support)

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.