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- Date:
- Thursday , June 04, 2009
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Foxconn Flaming Blade
The Flaming Blade amounts to a cut down version of the BloodRage we looked recently. Both are similar in appearance, but that's where the similarities end. Despite being stripped down and having a really gay sounding name, the experience we had with it was a far better one than the BloodRage provided.
Introduction
Foxconn is one of the largest manufacturers of computer hardware on the planet. Foxconn has become almost a house hold name (at least in PC enthusiast's houses) in the last couple of years. Its products, for better or worse, have built up a cult-ish following. Foxconn offers the usual array of lower priced boards from budget M-ATX boards to its premium Quantum Force branded enthusiasts boards. The Flaming Blade is part of the Quantum Force line of enthusiast boards which is the motherboard we are reviewing today. Like its more expensive cousin, the BloodRage, it is marketed to overclockers and gamers. Which are often one and the same.
The Foxconn Flaming Blade is based on Intel's X58 chipset and ICH10R south bridge. The Foxconn Flaming Blade supports LGA1366 Intel processors. The X58 chipset of course supports DDR3 memory only. The Flaming Blade uses all solid state capacitors and a 6-phase power design. Most X58 boards use a 12 to 14 phase power design in comparison. With that said a 6-phase power design built using premium components beats out a 16-phase design using bargain bin parts. The board supports SLI and Crossfire technologies. It does not support 3-Way SLI or CrossfireX using more than two physical video cards. It does however support NVIDIA's Quad-SLI and AMD/ATI's CrossfireX using two-dual GPU based cards.
Main Specifications Overview:
Detailed Specifications Overview:
Packaging
The board is packaged in what is become the standard box for many of the nicer boards out there. A large box with the board being contained in a smaller box, and the accessories packed in yet another box inside the larger box. The packaging was effective at preventing damage to the board during shipping. The Flaming Blade arrived nice and damage free. This fact alone was an improvement over the Foxconn Blood Rage which came to us with a broken SPDIF port.
Board Layout
The layout could have been better on the Flaming Blade. I have found three things I don't like with the layout. Granted two of them are very minor and are all things that I think most people can overlook. The last one won't impact everyone, but is something that should have been avoided. The first issue I have is with the location of the floppy port. I've never liked this location for my own reasons but frankly it’s not a big deal. I doubt many people will be using this port anyway, but if you do, it might be problematic. (Kyle’s Note: I always liked the floppy port being along the bottom edge of the board as you could use a longer ribbon cable and run it underneath the motherboard and flip it up at the edge and plug it in easily while keeping the cable hidden.)
The second issue I have is that Foxconn didn't use right angled SATA ports with the locking feature. Instead they used the kind that plug straight down into the board. Two of the ports also intersect the edge of longer video cards in the first PCIe slot. Plugging stuff in a less than ideal experience with a large or long graphics card installed and can be somewhat messy looking.
The third issue is the most important. When I installed my Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme RT 1366 I found that the fan doesn't have enough room to clear the first DIMM slot. Considering the board only has three DIMM slots I consider this a fairly hefty screw up in regard to the layout. This won't affect, or shouldn't affect anyone using water blocks, and frankly many CPU heat sinks and fan units will fit without issues, but the Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme is really the gold standard for heat sinks these days and many units are such as the Prolimatech Megahalems CPU cooler appear to be closely modeled after the Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme and have similar dimensions. In an effort to work around the problem I simply moved the fan up so that it sat on top of one of the RAM modules. Not ideal, but annoying. (Kyle’s Note: And do keep in mind there is a correct orientation with properly built heatpipe coolers.)
The CPU area is too crowded as I said before. The proximity of the memory slots is too close to the CPU area. Larger coolers like the Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme are just flat out too close to the DIMM slots. All is not lost however. The Foxconn Flaming Blade also has LGA775 mounting holes in addition to the LGA1366 mounting holes. This is a great feature but unfortunately it didn't work too well for me. The capacitors on the outer edge of the CPU socket made contact with my water block (Apogee GT) preventing it from making flush contact with the heat spreader of the CPU. This obviously won't always be the case, but it is something to bear in mind.
Like the Foxconn Blood Rage, the Flaming Blade has only three DDR3 DIMM slots and supports a total maximum of 12GB of RAM which is only half what the X58 chipset and Core i7's integrated memory controller can handle. There aren't any 8GB DDR3 modules I'm aware of and even if there were, they haven't been tested with the Flaming Blade or the documentation would probably indicate support for 24GB of RAM, which it doesn't.
The north bridge is exactly where you probably think it should be. Just to the left of the CPU socket. The north bridge uses a heat pipe cooling system that covers the MOSFETs and the south bridge. The north bridge cooling solution is actually quite small compared to others I've seen but always remained just a little warm to the touch. It never felt a whole lot warmer when I was overclocking the board. As a result I felt that the north bridge cooler worked really well.
As I have already stated, the south bridge is cooled by the same cooling solution that cools the north bridge and the MOSFETs. The system seemed very effective as both the north and south bridges were only slightly warm to the touch. I've seen larger cooling solutions that haven't worked as well. So Foxconn did a really good job here it seems.
The expansion slots are well thought-out and there aren't any problem areas or issues that I can envision. The board has two PCI-Express x16 slots, two legacy PCI slots, a single PCI-Express x1 and one PCI-Express x4 slot. All of which are thoughtfully placed. The board supports SLI/Quad-SLI and Crossfire/CrossfireX, but cannot support 3-Way SLI or CrossfireX using more than 2 physical video cards.
On the I/O panel we have a single legacy PS/2 keyboard connector, 1 CMOS reset button, 1 SPDIF output, 8 USB ports, 2 eSATA ports, 2 RJ-45 ports, and 6 mini-headphone jacks for audio output.