System setup and notes
We put the Foxconn through its paces against MSI's K9A Platinum AM2, a review of which will be arriving at Hexus.net shortly. The latter is a top-end board aimed at AMD Socket AM2 processors. These are the test configurations we used for the two systems:
Hardware
| System | Foxconn 975X7AB System | MSI K9A Platinum AM2 System |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, LGA775) | AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8GHz, 2 x 1MiB L2 cache, Socket AM2) |
| Motherboard | Foxconn 975X7AB | MSI K9A Platinum AM2 |
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1024) Corsair PC8500 | |
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-12 2T @ 800MHz (PC6400) | |
| Graphics card(s) | HIS X1900 CROSSFIRE EDITION + Sapphire X1900XTX | |
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | |
| BIOS revision | 635F1D08 (09/08/2006) | 1.2B1 (07/17/06) |
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf Update 8.0.1.1002 | Catalyst 6.8 Southbridge package |
| Graphics driver | CATALYST 6.8 | |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | |
Software
We ran the mainboards through our usual array of benchmarks.| 2D Benchmarks |
ScienceMark Memory Bandwidth ScienceMark Memory Latency HEXUS Pifast calculation to 10M places HEXUS Cryptography Realstorm Raytracing 2004 KribiBench v1.1 HEXUS WAV encoding HEXUS DivX encoding Cinebench 2003 v9.5 HDTach 3RW |
|---|
| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.04 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Futuremark 3DMark05 b1.2.0 |
|---|
However, we've only quoted the most significant results on the next page
Notes
As always, we ran each benchmark a trio of times, discarding the outer results and reporting the middle one. If any of the three results looked erroneous, we threw all three away until we could collect three within a margin of statistical error. We report any major attempts needed to get three reliable results, of course. Apart from that, things are as noted on the graphs and in the graph commentary. Want to know more? Head for the HEXUS.community.Our results show the Foxconn 975X7AB to be a competent i975X performer, generally matching abit's AW9D Max motherboard blow for blow. We're more interested in how it compares to the competition from a high-end AMD motherboard and range-topping FX62, as that's the obvious competitor for users looking to upgrade to one platform or the other.
