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Category: Motherboards
Manufacturer: Foxconn
Foxconn C51XEM2AA 8EKRS2H Motherboard Review
Posted by: Nabil Kamil on 14th of August 2006

Introduction

Foxconn has been trying hard recently to shed its image as a budget hardware provider, but I think this board, the C51XEM2AA 8EKRS2H is the first that really made me sit up and notice them as a new player in the high end motherboard market. Based on the new nForce 590 chipset, this board is packed with a plethora of features and claims to offer huge tweaking and overclocking potential.



The first bite, as they say, is always with the eye and Foxconn has certainly got this covered with their smart nVIDIA inspired packaging. In fact Foxconn has almost as many of the chipset manufacturers’ logos on its box as it has its own.

The Board



The board has a sleek black PCB and a prominent green nVIDIA-branded chipset cooler. The layout for the most part is good, with sensible placing of the main power loom connector, the single IDE port and SATA connectors. Less sensible is the positioning of the floppy connector which is right at the bottom of the board, and the extra Molex power connector which will be needed when running SLI with video cards that do not have their own dedicated PCI-E power input. The 8-pin 12V auxiliary port is also inconveniently placed to the left and below of the CPU, which means the cable has to be routed over the CPU cooler. The CPU itself has a good amount of room on the left hand side, but is too close to the memory slots in our opinion. The Silverstone CPU cooler we used for this review required mounting either the other way around or moving the memory sticks to slots 2 and 4.



In terms of expansion ports the Foxconn has dual PEG slots, a single PCIe x4 slot, a single PCIe x1 slot and two legacy PCI slots. In this shot you can also see an LCD POST reporter which shows an error code should you experience problems during boot, as well as a horizontally mounted battery. A feature that us reviewers love, and you may find useful if you run your motherboard outside of a conventional case, is on-board switches for power and reset.



There are a total of two internal USB expansion headers, one for firewire and of course the usual front panel switch and LED headers. Unfortunately none of these are at all colour coded which means having the manual to hand when installing is a must. This isn’t as major gripe but its something the likes of Asus, MSI and Abit have been doing for many years. The chipset cooler is relatively quiet, but given the measly number of fins we would have preferred a passive solution for 100% reliability and likely lower temperatures. It also uses up a precious fan header, which as the board only has one of aside from the CPU fan could be a factor for those who don’t like running loud Molex-tailed fans.



The rear panel is well stocked, with a very generous 6 USB ports, audio headers, dual Gigabit LAN ports and both full-size and mini firewire ports, an optical SPDIF connector and two legacy PS2 connectors. Some users may miss the parallel port but they should really be thinking about upgrading those old peripherals now.

The Bundle



The bundle in a high end motherboard is almost as important as the features and layout, and Foxconn’s budget boards are rarely well stacked in this department. For this model however they have done extremely well, with a detailed manual, a quick start guide, rounded IDE and floppy cables, six SATA cables, SATA power cables and extra headers for USB, serial and Firewire. There is of course the mandatory I/O shield and driver CD included as well.
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