Foxconn DigitaLife ELA P45 Motherboard

Test Setup and Overclocking
 
To ensure that all reviews on Overclock3D are fair, consistent and unbiased, a standard set of hardware and software is used whenever possible during the comparative testing of two or more products. The configuration used in this review can be seen below:
 
Test Setup
 
During the testing of the setup above, special care was taken to ensure that the BIOS settings used matched whenever possible. A fresh install of Windows Vista was also used before the benchmarking began, with a full defrag of the hard drive once all the drivers and software were installed, preventing any possible performance issues due to leftover drivers from the previous motherboard installations. For the 3DMark and gaming tests a single card configuration was used.
 
To guarantee a broad range of results, the following benchmark utilities were used:
 
Synthetic CPU & Memory Subsystem
• Sisoft Sandra XII 2008c
• Lavalys Everest 4.0

File Compression & Encoding
• 7-Zip File Compression
• River Past ViMark

Disk I/O Performance
• HDTach 3.0.4.0
• Sisoft Sandra XII 2008c

3D / Rendering Benchmarks
• Cinebench 10
• 3DMark 05
• 3DMark 06

3D Games
• Crysis
• Race Driver: GRID
• Unreal Tournament 3

 
 
Overclocking

Unfortunately, overclocking on the Foxconn ELA proved to be an exercise in self control and restraint. Pushing the Intel Q6600 processor any higher than 3.246GHz resulted in a subsequent BSOD or frequent lockups, and it required 1.5V Vcore to maintain ORTHOS stability at that clock speed. I even resorted to the included Fox One software in attempt to gain some additional performance from the motherboard, but unfortunately I experienced the same issues. No amount of tweaking or fiddling would allow me to push the processor harder and I had to admit defeat.
 

 Foxconn ELA @ 3.246GHz
 
 
Due to the lack of a CPU multiplier adjustment in the Foxconn ELA’s BIOS, I was unable to drop the multiplier to see how far the front side bus could be pushed. As a result, I have the highest attainable overclock CPU-Z screenshot available only. I wanted to try a dual-core CPU to see if the performance was any better but unfortunately I ran out of time.

During the benchmarking phase of the Foxconn ELA motherboard, our Q6600 ‘G0’ stepping processor will be clocked to 3.246GHz (highest attainable clock), where the comparison motherboards were overclocked to 3.6GHZ. Let’s see how the Foxconn ELA performs against some of the ‘bigger boys’ out there, including the P35 ASUS Blitz Formula SE…