Foxconn Digital Life ELA P45 Motherboard Review

Foxconn Fox One

Foxconn has developed a software utility that interacts with the Fox One IC on the ELA to give the user precise control over voltages and frequencies while in Windows. Fox One was a bit clunky when using it with the menus — it takes forever to slide around and respond but it’s rather useful and just needs a little tweaking.

Fox One will either let you manually overclock or attempt to push the system to a safe automatic limit. I found Fox One would stop responding if you tried to push the FSB in greater than ~35MHz increments or if you tried an OC that Fox One thought was unstable.

Fox One found its maximum OC to be 10x 404MHz for 4040MHz. Trying to start from 333FSB and push to 404FSB manually resulted in a crash. In fact, it would crash above 372FSB.

This DDR2 overclocking menu seems a bit silly. It’ll pump the FSB to hit the desired DDR2 speeds. Just a strange option and redundant. The PCIe adjustment is nice though; could have just put that under a general overclocking option though.

The voltage adjustments were rather useful for establishing stability at high overclocks but given the limitations of FSB overclocking with Fox One, this all could be done in BIOS. It would be nice to have all voltage adjustments available with Fox One.

You can set alarms for the CPU and system temperature here. These were both a blessing and a curse as the board would default to 60*C on the CPU while I was booting in at 72*C for the overclocking tests. It was effective at warning me but a nice feature would have been a delayed shut-down option.