Foxconn Blood Rage

Foxconn Blood Rage Features

• Support for Core i7 LGA1366 CPUs at 4.8-6.4GT/s QPI
  
• Intel X58 northbridge and ICH10R southbridge
  
• Three1.5V DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 12GB of memory
  
• Two Realtek RTL8111C Gigabit Ethernet controllers
  
• Four PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots providing two x16 or four x8
  
• One PCI-EXpress x1 slot
  
• One PCI slot
  
• Six ICH10R SATA 3Gbps ports supporting Intel Matrix RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD
  
• Two SAS/SATA ports from the Marvell 88SE6320 controller
  
• One IDE port supporting two devices from JMicron JMB363
  
• Two eSATA ports from JMicron JMB363
  
• One floppy connector
  
• Twelve USB 2.0 ports - eight on rear I/O, four via pin-outs
  
• Texas Instruments IEEE1394a Firewire supporting three ports - two via pin-outs, one on the rear I/O
  
• SONAR X-Fi Xtreme HD Audio card featuring the premium Realtek ALC889 audio codec supporting EAX 4.0 and CMSS3D.

Board Layout

Foxconn make a sexy looking piece of kit in red and black - certainly better than EVGA in our opinion, but whether it's preferred to Asus RoG or DFI's classic flourescent approach to its UT series. There's no doubt that this is a Quantum Force board though because the branding is littered everywhere.


It's evident that the design has been poured over meticulously and after a few generations of Quantum Force boards it's nice to see Foxconn getting it very right.


First of all - the CPU socket - that's 12+2 phases of analogue-digital VRM solely for the purpose of providing the right, stable voltage to both the Core i7 CPU and X58 northbridge. There's no Green hardware on this board either - it's the full fat 14 phases only, which should certainly have more capacity than the needs of anything inserted into a 1366 socket. Foxconn even said the board can work and overclock on just six phases, but in an exercise of sheer over-engineering, it simply doubled it up. Strangely though, Foxconn claims it "reduces motherboard heat" but then also claims they feature "double-sided cooling" implying both down into the board and up into the heatsink. The greater efficiency will reduce overall heat output, but you can't have it both ways, Foxconn.

Yeah, you read that right above - it's an analogue-digital setup. From the diagram below we can see the small black squares are the driver IC, then a row of small ceramic capacitors before a large and small digital MOSFET Foxconn dubs DirectFET MOSFETs. These two together allow a faster degree of precise switching compared to the traditional analogue only approach.

The downside is that it costs more to use (not that board economics seems to concern Foxconn). The DirectFETs are bonded directly to copper tracks in the motherboard, rather than having legs - it's simply a TSOP versus BGA style design that's held down with an integrated heatspreader, allowing the design to be smaller and cool better, and Foxconn even claims better reliability and efficiency as well.

Finally there are "higher quality" (according to Foxconn) Pulse ferrite cored, environmentally sealed chokes, a row of caps and a few more ceramic capacitors before the CPU socket. This is unlike say, MSI, which uses low profile High-C capacitors for the CPU socket instead.


The memory power phases mirror the hardware around the CPU, and gets three of the same DirectFET phases, with an additional cooler for them too. Finally, the CPU VTT also gets a couple of phases, but uses standard Power-PAK MOSFETs instead. In addition to all this, the entire board uses Fujitsu RE "50k hr" solid aluminium capped capacitors as well.