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Foxconn 975X7AA Crossfire Mainboard What you get First impressions are great ways to make or break your feelings about things. Foxconn certainly is one to get things kicked off on the right foot however. Opening up the package, we were gratified to find a well packed box of goodies. These included three black rounded IDE cables (two ATA133, one FDD); two red SATA cables; two SATA power adapter cables; I/O Plate; USB expansion bracket; IEEE 1394 expansion bracket with 6-pin and 4-pin Firewire connections; driver / utility CD as well as a fairly comprehensive user manual and easy install poster.
Layout Foxconn’s red PCB base sports connection points that for the most part are all color coded which we'll get to shortly. Four fan headers grace the 975X7AA with one being taken up by the active cooling on the Northbridge, two more on either side of the DIMM slots and the last being on the right edge just above the blue colored SATA ports.
The socket area appears reasonably clear and with our stock LGA775 cooler we didn’t see any undue problems for aftermarket coolers. One note here however is the proximity of the 8-pin 12v power connector. While the connector itself is no problem, once the power cable is plugged in, some oversized aftermarket coolers may be too big to use. We did not observe this but it seems a reasonable enough speculation that it bears mentioning.
Check out the Intel 975X Northbridge. It is actively cooled with a small 40mm fan atop a black aluminum heatsink. The heatsink isn’t especially large and its cooling seems to lean more on the volume of air moved. While this active cooling solution wasn’t exceptionally loud under power, it was loud enough to be a bit irritating.
Immediate to the right of the socket area are the DIMM, IDE and ATX power connection points. Each of the four DIMM slots supports up to a 2GB stick of 240-pin DDR2 ECC or non-ECC memory at speeds of DDR2 533/667/800. Just saying eight gigs of RAM makes me drool. The 24-pin ATX power connector (a 20-pin will also work), lone IDE channel (ATA100) and FDD connector reside along the boards edge is such a way as to make the cable conscious folks like me smile.
This was a new one on me. The four blue SATA connectors supported by the Intel ICH7R Southbridge have shrouds around them making for a snugger fit. I’m sure I’m the only person who has cracked a SATA cable end with the standard header found on other mainboards. These SATA connectors support RAID 0, 1, 5, 0+1 and the Matrix Storage Technology. The USB headers are color coded (green) and have shroud guides as did he SATA posts. Below the SATA and USB headers are the panel connectors and a spot for an optional ATA133 channel.
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