Layout and features
This Foxconn motherboard is referred to as the P35A - nice and simple. We're glad Foxconn shelved such previous extra-long names as P35ITSRAINING-KERMIT-7AXABXD-GB2007MKII.
Supposed hilarity aside, here is the Foxconn P35A in pictorial form. We'll highlight any salient points along the way.
The P35A is a regular ATX-sized motherboard which adheres to conventional socket and ASIC placements. The layout is a general departure from the P965 version's, so whilst it's priced at the low-end of the P35 market, Foxconn pays greater attention to heat dissipation via the use of a passive heatsink on the hot-running voltage-regulating components.
The CPU socket is reassuringly free of any major cooler-mounting obstacles and the 8-pin power connector is set in a decent location, right at the edge of the board.
Foxconn adds in a plethora of solid capacitors in lieu of the usual inferior electrolytic models found on cheaper motherboards. Durability and, to some extent, overclocking performance should be improved as a result of the switch.
Moving on across to the DIMM slots, DDR2-only in this case, everything appears to be in order. You can remove and install system RAM without having to fiddle with the primary graphics card, should it be extra-long, and, funds and OS-addressing permitting, populate the slots with up to 8GiB of system RAM.
The single blue-coloured ATA133 port, incidentally, is run off the JMicron ASIC that's just out of shot. It's also tasked at providing the single-port eSATA support present on the I/O section. Please bear in mind that it doesn't support optical drives under DOS, so it won't work with disk-imaging software that relies upon CD-based DOS access.
Moving on down to the southbridge, we see that Foxconn's use of the vanilla ICH9 southbridge is manifested in only 4 non-RAIDable SATA2 ports. Again, if you want more or greater storage flexibility, opt for the P35A-S SKU.
We like the onboard power/reset buttons and easy-to-access clear-CMOS jumper, and you can see the lime-coloured headers for a further 8 USB2.0 ports just above.
The use of a double-width primary graphics card will render the only available PCIe expansion slot useless. We'd normally recommend that Foxconn add a second, but it has already taken up the chipset's complement by adding a second graphics-card-based x4 slot, to the right.
We like the fact that Foxconn has used the 'NVIDIA-style' method of locking graphics cards into place. The tabs are easy to get to and, speaking from personal experience, keep installation frustration levels down.
Foxconn equips the board with the Realtek ALC888 codec which provides 10-channel (7.1+2) high-def support via the ICH9. However, it doesn't support DTS Connect - somewhat analogous to Dolby Digital Live - and thus cannot encode, in real-time, any PC audio into multi-stream DTS, which would then sent out to your amplifier via S/PDIF.
It's all fairly regular on the back. eSATA is the standout feature. This time around, Foxconn has eschewed optical S/PDIF-out in favour of the coaxial variety.