Foxconn 975X7AA: Fox One debuts

The Board

The layout of Foxconn's 975X7AA motherboard looks reasonably conventional at a first glance. The north bridge is actively cooled by a 40mm fan. During our testing of the motherboard this was the loudest part of our system, even with two Radeon X1900's running in CrossFire. We would have definitely preferred to see a passively cooled solution on the board. On the other hand, the south bridge is passively cooled with a low profile aluminium heatsink.

As seems always the case, there are some layout quirks with this board, the first being the positioning of the 8-pin ATX 12v connector. With larger heatsinks, the positioning could be a small problem, as it is away from the edge of the board, but still in the vicinity of the CPU socket. Cable routing would've been much easier if this was located along the edge of the motherboard, or even just a bit further away from the CPU socket.

Aside from this, the area around the CPU socket is clear. However, there are other cables that are likely to need routing above the PWM controllers next to the CPU. This includes the lone SATA connector (if used) and also the 4-pin molex connector next to the top PCI-Express x1 slot. An alternative would be to route a cable from near to the hard drive enclosure in your chassis, across the board and below the north bridge heatsink.

There are four fan headers on the board, one of which is taken by the heatsink fan combination on the north bridge. The CPU fan header is located close to the right edge of the board above the memory slots. Another 3-pin header is located near to the bottom right corner of the board, while the final 3-pin header is next to the BIOS chip about half way along the bottom edge.