Computex 2008 – The Roundup

In a world where the likes of ASUS, DFI, Gigabyte and others reign supreme where overclocking is concerned, Foxconn might not be one of the first companies to come to mind, understandably. They are looking to quickly change that, however, and I have little doubt they will if their boards perform and overclock as well as they look.

The Avenger was the first board I looked at. Despite being P45-based (which supports Crossfire at 8x), Foxconn included a special chip here, located between the dual PCI-E slots, that re-enable Crossfire in 16x speeds. I’ve been told (by another company) that such a chip would cost around $15 to implement, so this does of course add some overhead to the price of the board.

The board is clearly targeted for enthusiasts though. Included on the board are countless status LEDs that give you updates to the health of the system. Included also is a front panel that allows you some control and information of your system, although I somehow didn’t manage to grab a shot of it, so I can’t recall exactly.

The board will retail for over $300, which is high for a P45-based offering, but expected of something so feature-packed.

If there was any doubt that Foxconn wanted to become known as a company to offer ultimate overclocking boards, this component here pretty much confirms it. Once it’s installed, it will allow you the ability to use exotic cooling, such as dry ice. I am sure there will be more to it than that, but the manual is sure to explain it to some degree.

Some pro overclockers on hand.

It’s not all about overclocking, though. Also on-hand was a new DigitalLife series board, which, when released, will include both a front media panel and also a remote control, to help add to the usefulness of your HTPC. So far, the DigitalLife series seems to focus on AMD processors, since they seem to be the general choice for such systems today.

Another out-of-the-ordinary trend I noticed was companies throwing chipsets designed mostly for HTPC use, on a full ATX board. We didn’t see that with G35, but we are now seeing it with G45, such as with the example below.

Besides the board’s kick-ass color scheme, the G45 chipset allows for dual GPUs in Crossfire mode (8x) and also includes onboard video, thanks specifically to that chipset.