Foxconn 955X7AA, Intel LGA 775 Motherboard Review - 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 type of see that there are many connectors along the bottom and right side. This is possibly because of how many features this board has.

You can notice the Northbridge heatsink fan is large, in so far as these things normally go. Foxconn has set the board more than enough cooling for ever more power hungry chipsets. Around the processor socket, you can see that the motherboard does not contain any obstructions or capacitors that would cause problems installing an aftermarket cooler on your Pentium. Once taking a look around the motherboard, it also looks like its capacitors are general high quality. Here are the chipset specs:

Chipset

IntelŪ 955X Express + ICH7R
IntelŪ PentiumŪ 4, Socket 775, 800/1066MHz FSB
Supports Intel Pentium D, Prescott, and Hyper-Threading Technology

This part is full of fun things. It has our 4 memory slots, power connector, 1 Parallel ATA connector, and a floppy one too. You can not notice the SATA connectors or the PATA with RAID here, but I will provide you all the memory and storage specs now anyhow:

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
adds second SATA RAID controller (0, 1, and 1+0)

The PCI slots pretty much speak for themselves. There is more PCIe x1 than I am used to, and there is more than sufficient expansion available here:

Expansion

1 x PCI Express x16
3 x PCI Express x1
3 x PCI

You must give attention to is how close the PCIe x16 is to the top PCI slot. If you contain a video card with a large heat-sink, like an X1900XTX, the card will block it. You will be down to 2 PCI slots, which is still more than lots of people will ever want. It should still be sufficient considering you have included Gigabit LAN, audio, and lots of SATA and PATA with RAID; there is also additional than enough PCIe x1 added. Our video card is not that big, so it will not cause this problem though.

You might start observing a lot of jumpers scattered on the bottom right. On the bottom left side is audio central. Your case audio wires will go all the way front the front of your case to the back.

Frankly, this area seems little confused Connectors are spread out all over, but it is simple to find what you require with the manual mapping out where to find things. Two 1394 headers and two USB headers are spread out on the left of our picture. Front panel connectors are the entire manner on the right, so it is not long from the front of the case.

We also contain a TPM connector (Trusted Platform Module gives the capacity 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 varied into this area.

The I/O panel is packed complete things, and there is not a lot to include 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)
Extra 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 through cable/bracket from internal header