Foxconn Blood Rage

Foxconn Blood Rage

Manufacturer: Foxconn (Quantum Force)
UK Price (as reviewed): £275.99 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): $285.00 (ex. Tax)

Blood Rage. Blood. Rage. Rage of the Blood? It's blood red - is that it? Does it make you so angry to have your blood rage?

Maybe using it gives you that hyper masculine feeling of watching a Jack Bauer Power Hour? I know at least the last one is a no, don't worry, Jack.

Foxconn's latest angry addition to its Quantum Force range looks to be promising and finally fulfilling as the spec sheet reads like an exercise in over engineering, not attempted since the industrial revolution.

Having said that, we've not had the best of experiences with Foxconn's Quantum Force boards to date - the P35 MARS was six months late to market and failed to impress us, and the Black Ops was also so far behind the curve of X48 boards we felt people simply weren't going to consider a £250 upgrade when Nehalem news leaking out left, right and centre during Q3 last year.

The Blood Rage sets this ailing trend straight though; while it wasn't precisely "at launch", Core i7 boards have been hitting in dribs and drabs since last November and this is only the first of three (or more) recent Foxconn Quantum Force boards for Core i7 too. Mixing it up with the best of the extreme overclocking competition from DFI, Asus, EVGA and Gigabyte, Foxconn has undoubtedly got a lot of competition and with OC-Guru Shamino defecting to EVGA, does Foxconn have enough engineering prowess under its black and blood red attire to stand up on its own, generating the right pedigree for the Quantum Force range?

Box Contents

• Two red SATA cables with 90 degree connectors
  
• Three short red SATA cables
  
• IDE cable
  
• SLI bridge
  
• Power and SATA adapter for SATA hard drives (including SSD)
  
• USB and 4-pin Firewire PCI bracket
  
• 40mm northbridge fan with retention clips
  
• Silicon paste
  
• Two molex to SATA power adapters
  
• Northbridge Waterblock with hose clips
  
• Northbridge LN2 pot
  
• Self adhesive mini-heatsinks

Foxconn absolutely nails the bundle in our opinion - there are a couple of long, 90 degree SATA cables for optical drives and then short 10cm ones for hard drives! That means no cable mess in normal cases because the SATA ports are almost adjacent to the hard drive cages, which leads us to question - why has no one else done this before?


The PCI bracket provides an extra few USB ports and a different Firewire socket to rear I/O. Foxconn includes no less than three types of cooling for its northbridge - a normal heatsink with optional fan, a quality copper and brass waterblock (it weighs a tonne) and even a metal LN2 pot. The quality of everything has been greatly improved since the Black Ops and we can't find fault - everything is a value add to a very high end extreme-OC board.