![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, April 22, 2009
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Foxconn BloodRage Motherboard
The Foxconn BloodRage was one of the most anticipated X58 boards made. The board comes packed with innovative features seemingly poised for "extreme" overclocking. Whether these statements are hype, marketing fluff, or fact remains to be seen. Read on as we separate the fact from fiction.
Aegis Panel
The Aegis Panel is Foxconn's bundled overclocking utility and hardware monitoring suit. Version 2.1.2.46 was used for testing. This version of the software sports some kind of medieval theme. I'm not sure why. Perhaps to entice the World of Warcraft fanbase? I have no idea behind the purpose of this oddly themed application. By oddly, I mean the helmet with the Cylon scanner eye light thingy you can see in the picture. The application takes the form of a tool bar at the right side of your desktop by default and there are several icons which don't correspond to any analog that allows to figure out what they hell they are for without actually highlighting each icon and looking at the roll over text appearing at the top of the tool bar.
Quite frankly we are over all of the Asian ripoff marketing crap. It is old and tired and simply shows a lack of any real marketing department besides a 14 year old that is good with Photoshop.
Each of the icons is animated when you place the mouse cursor over them. You can see a still of the Battlestar Galactica Cylon eye in the second image. Below the medieval Cylon head are a shield, some plate armor a Kukri Machette looking knife thing, and an axe. They of course correspond to various functions supported by the software. The armored Cylon looking head thing is the hardware monitor. The shield is for the overclocking part of the software, the armor plate is the Quantum Force OC Panel, the machete/knife thing is the OC Gear panel and finally the axe is the configuration menu.
The hardware monitor shows three additional icons, and the main screen for it shows Vcore, CPU_VTT, +3.3v, +12v rails and so on. There is another machete icon that when clicked brings up adjustment sliders for all the values shown in the hardware monitor. The fan propeller blade icon shows the fan speeds (This is actually the only icon that makes any sense here, but is way out of context for the theme of the software.) When clicked it shows fan speed values for the CPU, north bridge and system fan speeds are become adjustable. The firewood icon indicates temperature monitoring. You can see north bridge, system and CPU temperatures. When you click on the firewood, you can set thermal thresholds for each of the three values.
Once clicked, the shield icon brings up the overclocking functions of the software. Basic processor information is shown here along with the current clock speed of the processor, which is displayed in large text. The bus clock is adjustable here via a slider and the arrows shown on either side of the bus clock value. They've broken up all the settings for the CPU, chipset, and the memory by category. Within each category you'll find adjustable values for voltages for several settings also represented in the BIOS. The QF OC Panel is represented by the armor icon and the Real Time Clock shows an hour, minutes and seconds display, but beyond that doesn't do anything. There are several icons at the bottom with some dots underneath them that you'd think would highlight. Unfortunately, clicking anything in this window does absolutely nothing for you. At least that was my experience anyway. The OC Gear Utility is a simple utility that allows you to save and store performance profiles. While the utility is simple to use, it is slow. Very slow. This makes using it somewhat less than pleasant. The last icon, the axe simply brings up a configuration screen, which doesn't do anything accept toggle the application starting with Windows. It does nothing else. For whatever reason the screen capture shows the window as having no options, but when seen on the actual test system, this isn't the case. Additionally the version number of the application is shown in the window.