Overclocker Cafe - Foxconn Dual Core Motherboard Roundup

Foxconn Intel Dual Core Motherboard Roundup

Foxconn 945G7MA

First up is the 945G7MA from Foxconn's Compete series lineup. This is a micro ATX motherboard with onboard video, but don't hold that against it because it's got plenty of other goodies as well.

The bundle is quite nice for a budget board with onboard VGA. Along with the driver CD and manual, we've also got one of those nice quick setup posters which makes getting started easy. Foxconn has included two IDE cables, two SATA cables, a FDD cable, rear I/O back plate and two SATA power adapters. The two floppies contain the IDE and SATA RAID drivers.

The first thought I had when I looked at all of these boards was how roomy they seemed. Even this micro ATX board seems to have plenty of space to move around in.

Even the area around the socket seems roomy. While those capacitors may get in the way of some of the monster style heatsinks, the Intel heatsink and most after market ones should work fine.

The four DIMM slots are grouped together with the 24-pin ATX connector and the primary IDE and FDD connections.

The secondary IDE connection is at the bottom of the board, below and to the left of the SATA connections. With four SATA connections and two IDE's, you should have plenty of drive space with this board.

Foxconn is using passive heatsinks for both the Northbridge as well as the Southbridge chipset.

While I do prefer an active sink for the Northbridge, the size of the sink should prove sufficient for cooling. Not to mention the color of both sinks is pretty sharp looking in contrast with the board.

The rear connections are just stuffed full of goodies here. With the inclusion of the onboard VGA, we've also got four USB, the onboard LAN and onboard IEEE1394 connections as well.

Not to mention the 7.1 channel onboard sound too!

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