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Installation
Installing the 925XE is fairly straightforward. There is nothing of real
concern to those of you familiar to the LGA platform, although we must make
mention of the 24 pin ATX connection which you'll need. Most if not all good
name brand power supplies from companies like OCZ and Fortron Source come with
the 24pin orientation not as an option, but its just the reverse. We recommend
that if you decide upon a LGA platform, that the power supply you buy comes with
24 pins and not 20pion with a 24 pin adapter. It should be 24 pin with a 20 pin
adapter, you can't upgrade a power supply that doesn't have the 24 pin standard.
Other than that little rant, the 925XE was a breeze to get up and running. We
simply ran one SATA drive, installed Windows XP SP2, and we were up into a new
OS in less than an hour. The only problems that came up was installing the audio
driver. Although not really a problem, but for those of you not familiar with it
it may be. We had to reboot three times to get all of the Realtek 7.1 audio
drivers installed to the point where we could use the sound. Those of you not
familiar with that may perceive a problem, so just keep rebooting and everything
should be up and running in no time. A simple mention of this would help Foxconn
out, so we'll just do it for them..;)
The Bios
The Bios on the 925XE is a really nice addition for Foxconn, and we will keep
an eye on them in the future, as we're pretty sure that more options will be
made available from not just flagship boards like the 925XE, but others as
well...
Some assorted BIOS features... The PCI-X menu is new to us all...
Going into the BIOS features and then choosing SuperSpeed puts you into the
good menus
A full array of voltage options for the chipset, DDR, and CPU are readily
apparent. The DDR Divider is there along with options to change your memory
settings... For some of you out there you may be asking why the small
adjustments? Well during our testing of this board we observed that we could
pretty much max it out before any voltage adjustments needed to be made. We were
able to hit another 10mhz by increasing the CPU voltage to 1.625 but that was
it.. 277fsb was the max from, what we could tell, but that is a sizeable
increase up to almost 3.8Ghz... and this was using the 3/4 ram divider which ran
our memory up to 353Mhz!!! (706 DDR)
The pictures above do not show what we've become accustomed to with Foxconn,
and the best part is that this is their first board that we've reviewed with not
just voltage options, but good voltage options! For those of you not familiar
with DDR2, well, lets just say it needs very little voltage to get up to running
some fairly high speeds.
Performance
We decided on two level of performance. One running defaults, and another
running the system at the maximum processor clocks we could, along with the
video card clocks maxxed out. We choose to use the factory retail Intel HSF,
along with some fast DDR2 from Crucial's Ballistix lineup. Apollo generously
came to the rescue with their latest nVidia's series of PCI-X cards, the 6600GT.
Using vast amounts (well not really, just a dab) of OCZ thermal paste, and
assortment of game time demo and the traditional synthetic run of benchmarks, we
stayed entertained until proper flogging of the 925XE would be represented... :)
SiSoft Sandra 2005 Pro
CPU
MMX
Memory
Disk Access
Fairly impressive
benchmarks, although its nothing to write home about.. Even though its a 2.8Ghz
processor with DDR2 memory, an A64 2800 would more than likely school it fairly
well. Did I mention stability? Yes it is very stable, even overclocked, which we
really wanted to do ASAP, but beforehand we wanted to incorporate another
benchmark, that isn't really a benchmark, but more of how well the setup can
process data. we reached into our Google hat and found Super PI which basically
tells you how fast a system can fetch a specified amount of data and process it.
We tested our default configuration using the 1M test.
47seconds is a fairly decent score given that we haven't
touched anything...
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