Foxconn X38A Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

Performance:

Well the benchmarks speak for themselves. The board hung in with, and sometimes beat its more expensive ASUS counterpart. Neither DDR2 nor DDR3 performance seemed to suffer from the hybrid style of ram compatibility. In short, I would have no trouble purchasing this board, with the confidence that I would not be suffering in the performance department.

BIOS Features:

The only real grip I could come up against the board would be in the BIOS menu area. Foxconn offers tons of options to set up the board exactly the way you want it, but digging through constant submenus to accomplish this becomes tediousfast. Also, sometimes the board would choose to reset to more conservation Ram timings on reboot, requiring another joyous trip around the menu block to reconfigure. These are really minor gripes on an otherwise outstanding board.

Board Features:

The Foxconn X38A motherboard offers everything you could want out of an Intel X38 Express chipset based board. After you get past all the standard X38 features such as dual Lan, HD audio, PCIe-Gen 2.0, the board goes the extra mile of adding in dual ram compatibility. This lets you take advantage of great DDR2 prices right now, with the added piece of mind of future upgradeability when DDR3 prices stabilize. When you factor in that this comes at no apparent cost to performance, you cant really ask for more

Pricing and Availability:

As of this writing, I could only find about two online retailers offering this particular board, with costs running from $220.00-$240.00 US currency. Considering some flagship X38 boards cost in the upwards of $350.00 or more this is a great value. You get all of the specifications and features of the more expensive brethren, at a much lower cost. Considering the future proofing built into this board, its a hard deal to ignore.

Legit Bottom Line: In the end with all points considered, Foxconn lived up to their motto. They fully realized the Art of More.