Foxconn C51XEM2AA AM2 SLI Mainboard 

This is a feature we've seen before but nowhere near enough.  Below the front panel connector pins are two buttons, one is an auxiliary power button and the other an auxiliary reset.  The real value in this is for system builders who may not be using a traditional rig for testing, say a Senfu DIY rack for instance.  With these you can actually turn the board on without connecting any of the front panel connectors.

Continuing our clockwise tour of the Foxconn's AM2 board we come to the expansion slots.  Two full 16x PCI-E slots are present for any SLI combination you have.  That by the way, is a full 16x per slot not 16x divided between the two.  The increased bandwidth will give you a nice performance edge to go with your high dollar video card dual system.  The other slots are one PCI-E 1x, one PCI-E 4x and two standard PCI slots.  The connectors you see beneath the last PCI slot is an auxiliary 4-pin Molex plug that very well may come in handy with the extra fans on high end cards.  The other connector is your IEEE 1394 header.

This is a rear I/O view of the socket area showing the 8-pin ATX 12 volt plug and the passively cooled SPP 590 chipset.  The convection fins on the SPP sink are turned so that air coming off a CPU cooler will help circulate air through keeping things comfortable.

Our last shot of the physical board is from the view of the I/O plate itself.  Two Gigabit jacks sit on top of a total of four USB ports.  These are augmented by the 7.1 + 2 channel high definition audio jacks including an optical S/PDIF out port (you HTPC folks just perked up), a IEEE1394b atop two more USB ports, a smaller IEEE1394a port and your standard PS/2 mouse and keyboard jacks. 

BIOS

The Foxconn C51XEM2AA's BIOS is our well known friend, the Phoenix Award BIOS.  The Phoenix Award BIOS is probably the most popular and most familiar BIOS to us all.  Let's see what Foxconn has put inside for us.  To this end, from a practical standpoint, we are only going to look at the settings the bulk of you will being using rather than make this review a recitation of the BIOS section in the user manual.

The screens are very intuitive and function much like those of a data tree.  Starting at the Advanced Chipset screen we see several options.  Each of these opens into options specific to that tab with sub trees under them.  First up, System Clocks.

 

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Pg 1 - Introduction / What you get
Pg 2 - Layout
Pg 3 - Layout / BIOS
Pg 4 - BIOS / Performance
Pg 5 - Performance / Fox Liveupdate / NVidia nTune
Pg 6 - Overclocking / Conclusion