Foxconn 945P7AA-8EKRS2: Lots Of Features
The manufacturer Foxconn is still ambitious when it comes to establishing its name in the channel market and increasing brand-awareness with end users. At the same time, the manufacturer has an excellent pillar in the business and OEM segment, since this is were Foxconn grew up. Today, the firm sells even more motherboards in this category than Asus.
The ingredients that Foxconn uses for its 945P motherboards can be considered top notch. Thanks to four phase voltage regulators there are no limits regarding processor deployment - everything up to the Pentium Extreme Edition 840 can be used. There are three 32 bit PCI slots and two x1 PCIe slots, and we also found HD audio, including a coaxial digital output, a Firewire chip by Texas Instruments and an ITE controller (described previously) which adds two UltraATA/133 channels.
Due to the large number of components used (there are two Gigabit Ethernet chips and a piezo PC speaker), space is limited on this rather compact motherboard. Both the Floppy and one UltraATA connector had to be moved to the loved edge of the board. Although this is not ideal, at the same time it's obvious that there is little room for alternatives here.
It is a bit difficult to remove the PCIe graphics card if it is equipped with a large heat sink. The reason is that the PCIe card lock can hardly be accessed due to several components that are placed directly around this area.
It would be nice to have color-coded connectors (e.g. for the pin panel). Apart from that there is not much that could be added to a motherboard in this price range - a long list of overclocking features is also included.
