Benchmarks and system testing:

All benchmarking and system testing was done at default setting, no overclocking was done for any of the benchmarks. Software used for testing will include.

- We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds, using the 32-bit 2005 version.

- The ZD Winstone suite is a script that runs a series of actions and calculates a final score that measures a PC's overall performance. Higher numbers are better.

- We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

- Blue October- Argue With a Tree CD1 was ripped into one .wav file. We then encoded that .wav file into a 320Kb/s sample rate MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Doom 3 , FarCry, UT2K4 @ 640x480, LQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. These results are real-world, and higher scores are better.

All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed. For comparison of similar systems take a look at some of our other benchmarks that can be found here.

Across the board there isn't a WHOLE lot of difference in the Foxconn NF4SLI board and the Foxconn 975 Crossfire board. With Identical hardware in each system for the tests ran that's not surprising. The Intel chipset does perform slightly better, and in all honesty it makes sense that an Intel CPU would perform a bit better with an Intel chipset.

Business Winstone 2004
Business Winstone tests using "real world" applications like Microsoft Excel, FrontPage etc. In this test the higher the score the better, benchmark was ran three times and the score is the average.

	Score
Foxconn 975X7AA	26.2
Foxconn NF4SLI7AA	24.4
ECS PF21 Extreme	22.1

The 975 chipset shows a slight lead here, although not significant.

PiFast is a number crunching benchmark, for this one we are shooting for the lowest time possible.

	Time
Foxconn 975X7AA	47.72
Foxconn NF4SLI7AA	47.20
ECS PF21 Extreme	48.34

All results this far show that the Foxconn 975X7AA is pretty much right on par with similar boards, only having a slight lead in most of our tests so far. At this point I wouldn't rule out any of the boards tested and it would come down to personal preference, SLI, Crossfire or in the case f the ECS board a single GPU solution.

Overclocking

After the excellent overclocking potential I experienced with the Foxconn NF4SLI7AA I had high hopes for this board. After a few minor hiccups and a talk with a tech from Foxconn I was off and running. I knew this CPU could handle a significant jump so I started off at 225 FSB, with a multi of 17 this gave me a CPU clock speed of 3.8GHz. Several stress tests later I bumped it up another notch to 230 for 3.9GHz. This is where I started having problems. A slight increase in CPU and RAM voltage and we were stable at 3.9 and that is where it topped out. 3.9 is a respectable overclock IMO, but I was hoping to match the 4.1 I reached on the Foxconn NF4SLI7AA. One thing to note here is the CPU and RAM FSB are not Adjustable individually. Running the RAM at 800MHz puts the CPU running at 4.08GHz which resulted in a failure to boot. With more adequate cooling as well as fine tuning of the CPU and RAM voltages I'm sure a stable 4+GHz OC can be reached.

Final Thoughts

From an enthusiast standpoint I have mixed feelings about this board, I was unable to match overclocking results I had obtained on similar equipped boards. THE CPU FSB and RAM frequency not being adjustable independently of each other prevent me running the memory at its rated frequency of 800MHz as running at that speed resulted in an unstable overclock on the CPU. From the standpoint of a slightly above average user (one familiar with the BIOS and interested in overclocking) this board is an excellent starting point . The Fox One software makes it easy for a novice overclocker to make adjustments within Windows with confidence. (Every time I pushed it to far it would reboot to it's last stable setting) For the user that just installs their hardware and forgets about it this is an excellent choice, setup and install was extremely easy.

Pros: Crossfire support, Novice overclocker friendly, features, external SATA

Cons: Not a great overclocker in my experience, capacitors near CPU are in the way of some cooling solutions.

Bottom Line: Although not likely to recommend this board to someone well versed in overclocking I would still whole heartily recommend it to someone looking to get into overclocking and looking for a user friendly, feature packed board. This is Foxconn's first go at the 975 chipset and I feel for the entry level enthusiast it is a solid choice, there's no doubt that future Foxconn boards based on this chipset will pick up where this one left off.

If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

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