Foxconn 955X7AA, Intel LGA 775 Motherboard Review - Touring the Motherboard
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Touring the Motherboard
The board is a bright red with black and white parts, and the layout looks pretty ordinary at this point. You can kind of see that there's a lot of connectors along the bottom and right side. This is probably because of how many features this board has.
You can see the northbridge heatsink fan is huge, as far as these things usually go. Foxconn has given the board more than adequate cooling for increasingly power hungry chipsets. Around the processor socket, you can see that the motherboard doesn't have any obstructions or capacitors that would cause problems installing an aftermarket cooler on your Pentium. After taking a look around the motherboard, it also looks like its capacitors are general high quality. Here are the chipset specs:
Chipset
Intel® 955X Express + ICH7R
Intel® Pentium® 4, Socket 775, 800/1066MHz FSB
Supports Intel Pentium D, Prescott, and Hyper-Threading Technology
This area is full of fun stuff. It has our four memory slots, power connector, one Parallel ATA connector, and a floppy one too. You can't see the SATA connectors or the PATA with RAID here, but I'll give you all the memory and storage specs now anyway:
Memory and Storage
(4) 240-pin DIMM sockets, max 8GB, dual channel DDR2-533/667 1.8V
1 x ATA/100
2 x ATA/133 (w/ RAID)
4 x SATA/300 (w/ RAID)
4 x SATA/150 (w/ RAID)
1 x Floppy disk drive
Supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, and Intel Matrix Storage Technology (1+0 on 2 HDDs)
Supports IDE RAID 0, 1, and 1+0
Includes second SATA RAID controller (0, 1, and 1+0)
The PCI slots pretty much speak for themselves. There's more PCIe x1 than I'm used to, and there's more than enough expansion available here:
Expansion
1 x PCI Express x16
3 x PCI Express x1
3 x PCI
One thing you should pay attention to is how close the PCIe x16 is to the top PCI slot. If you have a video card with a large heatsink, like an X1900XTX, the card will block it. You will be down to 2 PCI slots, which is still more than most people will ever need. It should still be enough considering you have integrated Gigabit LAN, audio, and lots of SATA and PATA with RAID; there's also more than enough PCIe x1 included. Our video card isn't that big, so it won't cause this issue though.
You might start noticing a lot of jumpers scattered on the bottom right. On the bottom left is audio central. Your case audio wires will go all the way front the front of your case to the back. We'll see a lot more jumpers next.
Honestly, this area seems a little messy. Connectors are spread out all over, but it is easy to find what you need with the manual mapping out where to find things. Two 1394 headers and two USB headers are spread out on the left of our image. Front panel connectors are all the way on the right, so it's not far from the front of the case.
The two Parallel ATA connectors are the RAID ones the support up to ATA 133. These are the secondary and tertiary IDE channels. The primary PATA channel was up a couple pictures (near the memory slots) and only goes up to ATA 100. All the SATA II RAID connectors are up at the top near the shiny Phoenix BIOS. Normal SATA connectors are all the way down at the bottom.
We also have a TPM connector (Trusted Platform Module provides the ability to the PC to run applications more securely, so the board is basically DRM-ready.), a BIOS reset switch, a COM2 connector, a speaker connector, and a fan controller mixed into this area.
The I/O panel is packed full of stuff, and there's not much to add to these specs:
I/O Panel
1 x PS/2 keyboard
1 x PS/2 mouse
2 x RJ45 (LAN)
4 x USB 2.0
1 x line-in/line-out/mic (audio)
1 x parallel (SPP/ECP/EPP)
1 x COM (16550-compatible UART)
Additional line-outs for 7.1 channel audio
2 x S/PDIF (1 x coax out + 1 x optical out)
2 or 4 ports USB 2.0 via cable/bracket from internal headers (shared w/ front)
1 x IEEE-1394b via cable/bracket from internal header
Now it's time for the challenge of installation. Let's plug everything in and see how easy it is to get going.
Next: Installation >>
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