FOXCONN BlackOps X48 Motherboard
Test Setup & Overclocking
To ensure that all reviews on Overclock3D are fair, consistent and unbiased, a standard set of hardware and software is used whenever possible during the comparative testing of two or more products. The configuration used in this review can be seen below:
During the testing of the setup above, special care was taken to ensure that the BIOS settings used matched whenever possible. A fresh install of Windows Vista was also used before the benchmarking began, with a full defrag of the hard drive once all the drivers and software were installed, preventing any possible performance issues due to leftover drivers from the previous motherboard installations. For the 3DMark and gaming tests a single card configuration was used.
To guarantee a broad range of results, the following benchmark utilities were used:
• Sisoft Sandra XII 2008c
• Lavalys Everest 4.0
File Compression & Encoding
• 7-Zip File Compression
• River Past ViMark
Disk I/O Performance
• HDTach 3.0.4.0
• Sisoft Sandra XII 2008c
3D / Rendering Benchmarks
• Cinebench 10
• 3DMark 05
• 3DMark 06
3D Games
• Call of Duty 4
• Quake 4
• Unreal Tournament 3
Overclocking
With so many options available, moderate overclocks were easily gained through the AUTO options and Level up configurations. Better overclocks were accomplished tweaking the Vcore/NB/VTT voltages.
You can see from the included CPU-Z screenshots (above) that the Foxconn BlackOps managed to extract a very reasonable overclock of 3.8GHz on my Q6600. This is made even more impressive by the fact that the Foxconn BlackOps managed to attain it with less voltage than required on the ASUS Rampage Extreme. The process of overclocking on the board was a pleasure too, with very little adjustments outside of the usual FSB, Vcore and Memory needing to be made. The BIOS also felt extremely mature and recovered extraordinarily well from failed overclock settings.
Dropping the multiplier to six, we set out to see how far we could push the FSB. I was expecting big things here from the Foxconn BlackOps, but it appears the motherboard doesn’t like anything much over 450MHz on Quad-cores. This isn’t too bad considering that most Quad’s will top out around 470 – 500 FSB, and is no way a bad reflection on the motherboard – it’s an overclocking beast. I did manage to get significantly better results from a dual-core.
During the benchmarking phase of the Foxconn BlackOps, our Q6600 ‘G0’ stepping processor will be clocked to 3.6GHz to prevent any bottlenecking.
Let’s head over the page to see how the Foxconn BlackOps performed in the benchmarks…
