Verdict: A reasonable overclocker, but nothing special

Foxconn may not be a household name in the UK yet, but the company is one of the giants of the industry, so it should have the expertise and manufacturing prowess to turn out good products.

This particular model, which I'm going to call the 975X7AB for short, is based on the Intel 975X chipset, so it supports ATi CrossFire. However, due to the arrangement of the expansion slots, if you install two dual-slot cards then only one PCI slot will remain accessible, which will restrict your upgrade options. In addition to the two PCI slots and two high-speed PCI-E slots, there are two 1x PCI-E slots.

Rather than bloat the 975X7AB with dozens of S-ATA II ports, Foxconn has wisely used an extra JMicron controller to provide an additional EIDE port (bringing the total to two), plus a single eS-ATA II port on the back panel for use with external drives. These supplement the four RAID-capable S-ATA II ports provided by the ICH7R Southbridge. Intel HD Audio is supported, as are eight USB 2 ports and two FireWire ports.

With the exception of the Abit AW9D-MAX, which is sneakily pre-overclocked at its default settings, all of the other 975X motherboards performed similarly at their stock settings. The 975X7AB's BIOS provides a reasonable range of options, such as the ability to boost the vcore by 24 per cent and the Northbridge by 0.24V, and increase the RAM to 2.4V and the FSB to 600MHz.

However, during testing, we found a bug whereby the BIOS doesn't increase the vcore, no matter which settings you choose. Instead, you can only overvolt the CPU using the FoxOne software in Windows, which allows you to increase the vcore by a paltry 0.1875V. We also found that if you set the Northbridge voltage to maximum then the 975X7AB won't POST. Using the FoxOne software, we overclocked the FSB from 266MHz to 320MHz, which is a respectable overclock, but nothing special.

Until the arrival of the Abit AW9D-MAX, it looked as if the 975X chipset was simply a poorer overclocker than the P965. However, now that Abit has proved that the 975X chipset can overclock well, it makes little sense to buy a 975X board that's merely an average overclocker

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