Foxconn revises X58 Renaissance motherboard

The coming of the Nehalem processor brings a new chipset, the Intel X58. This means motherboard manufacturers can start the competition again, adding large coolers, additional mosfets for power provision, or extra SATA connectors. Foxconn has updated its X58 Renaissance motherboard. We showed a prototype of the motherboard in August, and images of Foxconn's final version have now hit the web.

With the Renaissance, Foxconn shows that it wants to get rid of its boring image. The new Core i7 model uses a stylish black PCB and has a black/orange setting for the several connectors. The board features a six phase power provision and is cooled by a large cooling block that has heatpipes leading to the chipsetcooler. Apart from the four PCI-Express 16x slots, there's also a small PCI-E 4x slot and a regular PCI slot.

The six memory slots allow triple-channel DDR3 configuration and with 8 SATA ports, plenty of hard disks can be connected to the board as well. A strange thing is the chipset cooler, it seems that a speaker is located below the mesh. Whether this is a real speaker and what its use will be is still unknown. The small heatsink on the ICH10R southbridge has an added round shiny cap, to make it stand out a bit more. On the right of the board we find three buttons for power, reset and cmos clear, a helpful addition for the overclockers that don't install their motherboards in a case. 

The I/O panel features Gigabit LAN, firewire, two e-SATA ports and no less than a whopping 8 USB ports. An interesting fact is the lack of analog audio-connectors. It's possible that these are featured on a seperate expansion card for PCI or PCI Express, packed in similar audio solution to that of ASUS. The price for Foxconn's Renaissance motherboard has not yet been disclosed. 

Image source: Tech Connect.

Tags: cmos corei7 ddr3 firewire heatpipe nehalem overclocking sata usb x58

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