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Review of the Foxconn/Hoxtek F845S Pentium 4
Motherboard
By
flung
09/16/2002
WhiningDog.NET
1. Introducton
Many of you are familiar with the big names in motherboard
manufacturers for the Do It Yourself (DIY) audience. These are board makers
like Asus, Tyan,
Abit,
iWill and others.
Ever wonder who actually makes boards for the likes of Intel and big name
hardware vendors? You never see the mention of Asus in a Dell box. Who
makes an Intel board? Think Intel does? Think again! Usually the boards
are outsourced to other small lesser named companies since it's usually
cheaper to do so. Today we're going to check out a name in that particular
space - Foxconn.
Foxconn is known as a major supplier of boards to Intel as well as a supplier
of devices for the likes of HP, Dell, and Compaq. In fact, Foxconn is
also a maker of machines for Apple such as the iMac! Thanks to the people
over at AJump.com,
we're going to review a board that Foxconn manufactures in it's house
brand name known as Hoxtek. Note also that the board is sold under the
name of CasEdge which
is an affiliate company of Foxconn. This board is called the F845S and
is based off of the Intel 845 chipset which supports the older PC 100/133
SDRAM for the Pentium 4 Processor. I'd like to thank Mike and Victor over
at AJump for sending
us this product to review.
1.1 Packaging
The F845S comes in a fairly simple box with one
CD and a set of floppy and hard drive cables. Don't expect the board to
wrapped in a plastic case like other boards out there. Here are the pictures
of the Hoxtek case and the parts inside - a fairly no frills box.
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The Hoxtek Box
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From the front angle
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1.2 Specifications
Form Factor:
ATX (30.5cm x 21cm)
Chipset:
Intel 845
CPU:
Intel P4 478 pin upto 2.2 GHz
CPU FSB:
400MHz
Mem. Config:
(3) 168-pin unbuffered non-ECC PC133/100 SDRAM to 3GB
Memory Bus:
100/133 MHz
Expansion Slots:
1 AGP4X (1.5V compliant)
4 PCI slots
1 PCI/CNR shared slot
On-Board IDE:
2 UDMA/100 IDE channels
On-Board I/O:
2 Serial ports
1 Parallel ports
1 Game port
1 Floppy controller
1 IrDA Connector
USB:
Total upto 4 Max.
- 2 USB Stacked ports on back panel
( Top is USB1.1, Bottom is USB2.0 )
- 2 extra USB1.1 thru "Optional" USB cable
Audio:
ACL201A AC'97 Audio
- Line in, Line out, Mic. jack
Package With:
(1) User's manual
(1) FDD cable
(1) UDMA 100/66/33 IDE cable
(1) Driver CD (ver. MB006)
Here are some pictures of the board and its various parts
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Box opened
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All the pieces
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1.3 Other thoughts..
For those who read the specs above, you'll note
that I am reviewing an older board in many ways compared to what is out
on the market now. It's old primarily because of the support of the PC133
SDRAM and not the usage of DDR memory. This does severely limit the performance
of the Pentium 4 processor since it can be memory starved for a number
of applications. The 845 (Brookdale) chipset that was initially introduced
was Intel's initial answer to those who said that the Pentium 4 platform
was too expensive because of it's need for more expensive Rambus memory.
However the 845 wasn't exactly the answer that people were looking for
from Intel since SDRAM was just too slow in performance. The answer came
later in the form of DDR supporting 845E/G/GL chipsets. SiS and VIA also
introduced chipsets this past year that offer up support for DDR memory
on the Pentium 4 platform. With the success of DDR as a fast cheap memory
platform, is it no wonder that Intel has decided to part ways with Rambus?
Thus for this particular review, we will not concentrate too heavily on
the performance of the board. We all know that it's just not going to
perform up to par with a DDR based 845 board. However, I thought it would
be nice to check out the board from the perspective of putting together
a system with it.
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