Bundle and accessories
The presentation is much like the motherboard: to the point.
Hardware bundling is easy enough when you manufacture all the accessories. Keeping it sparse, Foxconn adds in a solitary ATA133 cable, non-latching SATA cable, molex-to-dual SATA adapter and a colour-coded I/O shield. A few extra SATA cables wouldn't have gone amiss and every board with 6 unconnected USB2.0 ports should be bundled in with at least a single additional backplane bracket.
There's also a multi-language foldout sheet that serves as a quickstart guide and the supplied CD contains a 90-day trial version of Norton's Internet Security 2006 as well as the usual glut of drivers. We'd like to see a printed manual, really.
Bundled in with chipset and ASIC drivers is Fox LiveUpdate, an easy-to-use GUI that lets you update the board's BIOS by connecting to Foxconn's servers. However, even with the onboard LAN driver installed and hooked up to a broadband connection the utility couldn't resolve the connection. Updating the BIOS locally from the hard drive, which we did to the P32 release, took significantly longer than expected, with the progress bar halting for minutes at a time, making this reviewer nervous for the board's well-being.
On a related note, Foxconn UK needs to update its download page for this motherboard. We couln't download the board's electronic manual or drivers. Thankfully, an updated BIOS was available.
We had more luck with the latest version of Fox One, the aforementioned motherboard-mounted chip that allows OS-based tweaking of key parameters. DRAM speed adjustment doesn't fall in line with the reported settings due to the setting directly increasing the bus speed. With memory running at DDR2-800 the final speed is derived from a 2:3 CPU FSB-to-DRAM ratio, so setting DRAM at 820MHz added 20MHz to the bus speed, pushing it up to 286.6MHz and, consequently, a CPU-Z-verified memory speed of 860MHz. Setting DRAM via Fox One to 830MHz led to 296.6/890 for bus and memory, respectively. Something that needs to be worked upon. There's also no setting that allows you to change the CPU's multiplier, should you so wish.
Fox One is somewhat akin abit's uGuru, and it's nice to see Foxconn offering it on a board that's not wholly directed at the enthusiast. It needs to be improved if it's to really compete with the slicker nTune tweaking that's available on NVIDIA's chipsets and abit's uGuru.
