Foxconn C51XEM2AA AM2 SLI Mainboard 

Under the System Clocks tab is where the bulk of your manual old fashioned overclocking will be done.  I intentionally said manual and old fashioned for a reason, which I'll get to shortly.  The listing here is fairly self explanatory with the reference clock being adjustable in 1MHz increments between 100 ~ 500MHz as well as its 'auto' setting.  The CPU Multiplier allows for selection of 4x up through 11x multipliers.  Bus speed and multipliers are fully adjustable with the PCI-E bus and the communication between the CPU, nForce MCP and nForce SPP chips.

The Voltage Screen provides direct control over the power input for multiple factors.  The most notable of these being the CPU and memory with ranges of 0.375 ~ 1.85v and 1.825 ~ 2.5v respectively.

The Memory Configuration and Memory Timing Screens are like wise fully adjustable to give the end user full control to tweak, twist and prod as they see fit.

  

The System Monitor is a very very vanilla item on the C51XEM2AA.  No warning or shutdown temperature trip points or even adjustments (here within the BIOS) for the fans but that is not a big a deal as you may think.  Maybe in a future revision of the BIOS we'll see them.  After we go through our testing, we want to take a few minutes to touch on Foxconn's Fox UpdateLive and NVidia's nTune that allow BIOS adjustments and automatic overclocking.  Very very very hip stuff.  But not just yet.

Performance

Our suite of benchmarking in this review will depart from the norm due to our not having any other socket AM2 based boards in the shop for a direct performance comparison.  To help give you some more information, rather than just spit out numbers, we have posted screen shots of the results screens from our benches.  These include PC Magazine's Business Winstone 2004; PC Magazine's Content Creation 2004; SiSoft Sandra 2007 Pro's Memory Bandwidth Benchmark, CPU Arithmetic Benchmark and Multimedia Benchmark; Super Pi and FutureMark 3DMark 2006. 

Test Bed

• AMD Athlon 64 3500+ socket AM2

• ThermalRight Ultra 90 Cooler

• Albatron GeForce 7800GTX

• (2) 512 MB DIMM of Corsair PC2 5400 Pro

• (2) 250MB Western Digital Caviar SE SATA II HDD in RAID 0

• Generic DVD-RW drive

• Kingwin Mach1 600w PSU

• Lian Li PCG-70 Tower Case

• Windows XP Pro with all service packs installed

Results

First up is PC Magazine's Business Winstone 2004.  Business Winstone 2004 runs a suite of many popular office programs, measuring their speed and generating an overall score.  The programs it uses are Microsoft Access 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft FrontPage 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Project 2002, Microsoft Word 2002, Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003 and WinZip 8.1.  The program makes four runs and displays an overall score for each.  Our results can't be cross compared with another system in an equal manner but do show results higher than those we obtained with an AMD Athlon 64 4000+ Clawhammer CPU in both a Foxconn 6150K8 board and an Albatron K8SLI mainboard which I do find impressive.

PC Magazine's Content Creation 2004 is another suite of office apps but it focuses more on design and creativity.  The programs run to generate a final score as shown below are Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0.1, Adobe® Premiere® 6.50, Macromedia® Director MX 9.0, Macromedia® Dreamweaver MX 6.1, Microsoft® Windows Media™ Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980, NewTek's LightWave® 3D 7.5b and Steinberg™ WaveLab™ 4.0f.  With our same apples to melons comparison in regards to our Athlon 64 4000+, the Foxconn C51XEM2AA with its socket AM2 Athlon 3500+ walked the dog all over the 4000+.  To the tune of 28% better than the results achieved at that time.  Wow!

 

BACK                    NEXT

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