Foxconn 925XE7AA-8EKRS2 Motherboard Review :: Setup and Bundle

Setup of the board went without incident. The 925XE board posted with the 3.4 Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPU we use for testing and the rest of our test bench. Temperature readings were on the low side, around 35C at boot for the CPU. No problems were observed installing a fresh copy of Windows or running the benchmark tests. After installing Windows, using the included Driver CD was simplicity itself. Just install the drivers in order and you should be good to go. Temperature at default CPU speed was a very manageable 40C.

One thing I have to take Foxconn slightly to task for is the positioning of the 4-pin power connector. It's nearly directly below the CPU socket, requiring the power cable almost cross over the CPU HSF. In my case, I had to slightly change the positioning of the power cable, as it nearly caught on the CPU fan. Otherwise the layout of the board is pretty good. There is a fan on the North Bridge chip that is not the norm and should provide excellent over clocking ability. One nice touch is the 24 pin ATX power connector's facing away from the DIMM slots, as it should be. There are tabs on the board for the two jumpers making for easy removal.

Foxconn has a utility called SuperStep to give the tweaker in us the flexibility to overclock from the Windows environment. SuperStep monitors the fan speeds of the CPU fan and North Bridge, the various voltages of the system; CPU and System Temperature, CPU, PCI and PCIexpress clock speeds, and alarm monitoring at certain intervals. From the fan speed tab you can adjust the low limit of fan speed for the fans being monitored. The voltage tab allows you to change the high and low voltage range for each setting. Temperature thresholds can be set from the temperature tab. Of course, the over clocker will want to adjust the FSB and that can be done from the clock speed tab. I clocked the FSB to 231MHz without incident using SuperStep (15% overclocking). Of course, mileage may vary.

Bundle

• Driver CD
• Norton's Internet Security
• User's Manual
• Rear I/O shield
• 1x floppy drive cable
• 3x IDE cables
• 8X SATA data cables
• 4x SATA power cables (supporting 2 drives each)
• 1x 4 USB 2.0 port cable
• 1x Coax-out, S/PDIF cable
• 1x 4-pin+1x 6-pin IEEE-1394 cable

Foxconn really went all out on the bundle for this motherboard. Especially gratifying is the inclusion of a 4 port USB 2.0 cable, bringing the total included with this board to the maximum of 8 that the 925XE supports. Too often, motherboard manufacturers only include 4 USB ports total, or include a 2-port cable bringing the total to 6. Foxconn also includes a 2-port Firewire cable, bringing the total supported on the board to 3.

Another plus is the inclusion of every SATA and IDE cable supported by the motherboard. Foxconn included the 8 SATA cables and 3 cables for the PATA drives and the floppy drive cable. This is another pet peeve of mine from other manufacturers. Too often, they'll include a single PATA cable and only one or two SATA cables.

With such an extensive hardware bundle, Foxconn had the opportunity to really go all out and include an excellent software bundle as well. Foxconn decided to include Norton's Internet Security software. This includes Norton's AntiVirus and Firewall software providing protection to the user's computer against viruses and hackers.