Introduction

X58 based motherboards are popping up thick and fast. And why not? - Core i7 is Intel's new cash cow and its performance is beyond anything that Core 2 could ever hope for. Thanks to the on-chip memory controller, Intel has finally abandoned the old FSB interface for this high-end CPU and move to a more data friendly bus between the Northbridge and the CPU. No longer are memory transactions between CPU and DRAM required to go across a limited bus.

The sad part is, however, at the present time there is only one chipset supporting Core i7 and that's Intel's own. The only other competitor is NVIDIA and there are no plans so far for a Core i7 chipset from them. My guess is that NVIDIA don't have a bus licence yet. ATI is well out of the market no thanks to being owned by AMD, but it would certainly be ironic to see an AMD chipset for an Intel product.

So far we have tested most of the major companies X58 offerings. We have already seen GIGABYTE, MSI, ASUS and DFI strut their stuff and today we have another channel partner in the fray and that is Foxconn.

Foxconn has really come a long way from just producing simple OEM boards; today they have their own enthusiast lines and we have their latest one in hand, the Quantum Force X58 BloodRage.