Foxconn MARS: God of War Performance?

Quick Thoughts

We are quite surprised with the performance of the Foxconn MARS board. That comment cuts both ways as the press hype, marketing materials, and packaging led us to believe the board would be a consistent front runner in the sub-$200 enthusiast market. In some ways it is; in some ways it is not. Maybe our expectations were set too high from the beginning after seeing the 575FSB pictures along with whispers of top tier performance for a budget price.

What we have at this point is a board that is competitive with the likes of the abit IP35-Pro, ASUS P5K Deluxe, Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6, and the MSI P35 Platinum. The MARS board offers basically the same feature set and support of of these other boards and in that context, it will find the current landscape to be very competitive. The natural competitor for the MARS board is the excellent abit IP35-Pro and looking at the two boards, we feel like Foxconn is going to need to drop their price (estimated MSRP is $199.99) below that of the abit board to garner buyer interest.

What we do not know is if Foxconn is willing to do this in order to gain entrance into a market where they are essentially a newcomer. Without a history in the Intel performance sector and a reputation of mass producing budget offerings with limited feature sets, it will be difficult at first to sway buyers accustomed to other brands. What we do know is that Foxconn is serious about the performance user and has put forth an excellent first effort with their MARS board. When looking at the board from this perspective, we are impressed with what Foxconn has put together and they are on the right track.



With that said, the board offers average overall performance in the P35 group but has a very strong showing in CPU intensive benchmarks and offers excellent memory latencies, provided you have memory capable of running CAS4 timings around DDR2-1066. Quad-core overclocking is excellent and is only surpassed by the latest X38 DDR3 boards at this time, although we still have a couple of enthusiast level P35 boards left to test that promise the same capability. After spending the last couple of weeks with the board we found it generally behaved better with the quad cores than the dual cores, especially when overclocking. Not that we had any issues with the dual cores; it's just the first board we have tested that generated that "feeling" of being designed with quad-core performance as the primary concern.

After some experimentation, we found the board was very easy to overclock, though it requires higher memory voltages than our other P35 boards. Without the ability to set the strap speeds, the result is a hunt and peck affair with the memory ratios/FSB speeds to find the right strap setting and then adjust the memory timings appropriately for stability or performance. While the brute force approach works at times with raising the voltages and lowering room temperatures, we were hoping for a little less effort being required to set up the board. It's not that we're unable to put in the effort, but this is not a DFI level BIOS yet, but it seems to require almost that level of tweaking in order to reach more moderate results.

The BIOS still needs a little polishing when it comes to auto settings; it generally chooses the right settings, but at times the memory timings are a little too aggressive or even too loose when manually setting the basic four timings. We are confident Foxconn will find the right balance before the board ships early next month, and stability is excellent once the board is dialed in. Hopefully, they will add the ability to manually change strap settings along with reducing the memory voltages required for high memory clocks when compared to competing boards in this category. Also, the Aegis panel needs to be updated quickly to include the promised overclocking features, something abit already provides with the IP35-Pro.

We are waiting on the final BIOS release before making a recommendation and providing additional overclocking and memory performance results with a wide range of components. Until then, we honestly have to say that Foxconn surprised us; the performance potential is definitely there, the layout is right on, and the feature set is competitive in this class. It appears that the board really is capable of living up to its namesake. It just needs that final coat of polish and a price adjustment to truly go to war; ,otherwise it could be left protecting the cattle.