Question about the Foxconn 975X7AB

Does the 975X7AB support the Conroe-L Celerons? The Foxconn website doesn't say. I am thinking of a new board for my Celly and this board caught my eye as it's pretty cheap for all it offers. The only negative thing I read was the lack of a CPU multiplier in the BIOS. If anyone can confirm this, I'd greatly appreciate it.

im going to have to say know if you cant find any docs saying otherwise. simply cause 975 was released before Core2. it took a VRM update to make it support voltage wise core2. i would look for another board.

I was reading some more reviews and this is the B version that supports Core 2. It might support 65nm quads too, at least according to a couple of the review sites it does.

The board arrived today and I'm impressed with the package bundle, it's pretty good for such an inexpensive motherboard. Several brackets, 90 degree SATA cables, I haven't seen a bundle this good with any of my boards since my old DFI. I'm looking forward to trying it out later. With any success I'll be able to get my Celly back up to 4 GHz on this board instead of the Biostar.

sweet!

I'm posting from it right now, running my E6600 at 3.2 GHz. It wouldn't boot with the Conroe-L, I believe it came with a 8/2006 bios. I've updated it to a 1/2008 bios and that should allow it to boot the Celly, but the bios on this board is quirky. Sometimes, mainly when overclocking too far, it will boot from a backup bios dated 2006. So it's doing 356 FSB right now, supposedly decent for a 975, the real kicker would be to get 400 out of it. It's a cool motherboard to play around with so far.

to get close to 400mhz on 975x your going to need to pump the MCH volts to it.... 1.5-1.7 wasnt uncommon to see used to get them to 400 and beyond.

I've had this board for about a week now and some further impressions...

I don't care for Foxconn's implementation of their dual BIOS setup. This board has a mind of its own in that it will boot off of the backup BIOS whenever it feels like it. I had to update to the latest version of the Foxconn Liveupdate program to be able to flash the board's backup BIOS to the same version as the primary BIOS. I've got both flashed on the latest version now, much better! I don't know if this board actually uses two BIOS chips or if it places the backup BIOS on the hard drive (I've read conflicting things) but if they do indeed use two chips I would prefer a jumper or DIP switch for selecting which BIOS to use instead of having the board automatically choose. Also, I would've preferred if the onboard power button was a CMOS reset button instead. Really that's a minor gripe, but in my case the CMOS reset jumper is a tight reach if I'm using the nearby fan header as well, a button would be easier.

I thought this board was really picky about DDR2-800 RAM as I was having trouble with getting two different sets to boot. Turns out I was just having some trouble understanding the memory dividers on this board. The dividers are listed as: 400mhz, 533mhz, 667mhz, and 800mhz. Figured out that this translates to:

400mhz = 4:3
533mhz = 1:1
667mhz = 4:5
800mhz = 2:3

I've tried a pair of 4850s in this system with DDR2-533 running the E6600 at 356x9, and the memory divider set to keep the RAM at 535. Here are some 3dm06 scores:

Two cards installed, primary card running at 8x, crossfire disabled: 3dm06 = 11578
Two cards installed, both cards running at 8x, crossfire enabled: 3dm06 = 14902
One card installed, card running at 16x: 3dm06 = 11683

Nearly 15k 3dmarks is 1k more then my overclocked 8800GT gets on my P35 running a QX6700 at 400x8 and DDR2-800 ram at stock speed and timings.

edit: Now that I have the dividers figured out I have the system running at 356x9 with some DDR2-800 and the divider at 1:1. Here are some 3dmark06 results of that with and without crossfire active:

crossfire active, both cards running at 8x: 3dm06 = 15089
crossfire disabled, primary card at 8x: 3dm06 = 11648

I saw some nice improvements with enabling crossfire, particularly so in 3dmark03 where the score went from nearly 41k to over 71k seen here and here.

Hello. I registered specifically to inquire about this motherboard. I'm hoping you can help me, benbaked. Are your POST times longer than usual with this motherboard? Also, the F-Lock LED stays lit up on my Logitech keyboard, even when my PC is off. What could be causing this?

if it is using usb then the light would still be getting power, if it's enabled before shutting down is my guess.

only things to really cause long load times are the hard drives them selves. then also letting the board auto detect the drives on bootup.

It's a PS/2 keyboard. It never did that with my previous motherboard (based on the nForce2 chipset).

The problem with the 975X7AB is that, from the time you turn it on until it displays the POST screen, there's a delay of about a minute. It has always done that since I bought it. I cleared the CMOS to see if that helped. Unfortunately, it didn't. The JMicron IDE/SATA controller is disabled. I'm using onboard SATA. Again, using my old motherboard as a reference, it booted almost immediately, so I'm at a loss as to why a newer system would behave like that.

I wonder if your problem is the dual BIOS ivanolo. Have you updated both BIOS to the latest version? Hopefully benbaked can offer a little input on how he updated his mobo.

Do you have any usb thumb drives plugged in? They can increase post time with some motherboards, doesn't seem to be your problem though.

benbaked said:

If I enable USB keyboard support in the BIOS, it hangs after the initial POST screen; everytime I boot or reboot it will sit there rebooting for at least a minute before I hear the POST beep.

Click to expand...

I just found this comment in another thread. That sounds like it might be the same problem ivanolo.

I flashed both the primary and backup BIOS using the utility provided by Foxconn, and the only USB devices I've plugged in are my trackball, webcam, and printer. I'll have to check to see whether USB keyboard support is enabled.

have you tried booting up with the usb devices unplugged and only the ps2 keyboard?

Nope. But I checked, and both USB keyboard and USB mouse support is disabled.

A few weeks ago I used their official LiveUpdate utility to flash to the latest BIOS for this board, 635F1P33 dated 08/16/2008, with unfortunately no change in the lengthy boot times. It still takes between a minute or two before I get the POST beep on every boot, and I can see the board reboot several times (its random) before the monitor engages and I get a POST beep. It has the boot delay with no USB devices inserted on mine, and the only storage devices are a 500 GB sata drive and an IDE DVD writer.

I've seen several reviews of this board claim the long boot delay issue as well, no idea yet why it happens. Other then that and the USB keyboard support issue it has been a great motherboard.

Well... I figured it out! I loaded the fail-safe settings in the BIOS and started customizing stuff until I found the root of the problem: the ECC memory option. As soon as I disabled support for ECC memory (which I have), the post time was reduced to normal. This kind of sucks, since one of the reasons I bought this motherboard was the fact that it had support for this kind of RAM. Meh!

I just reset the CMOS on mine, and then verified that it was taking a normal amount of time to boot. When I went into the Fox Control Unit portion of the BIOS to set my overclock (356x9, mem=533, vcore=+12%) I noticed my boot time increased by five-to-ten seconds. I also have ECC ram on this board and when I enabled ECC support the boot time was increased to nearly a minute. A minute ago I tried to get back into the BIOS and it came up to a blank screen with only a portion of the BIOS screen showing, after a reboot it allowed me to get into the BIOS. Unfortunately, after changing the setting "Halt on All Errors" to "Halt all but keyboard/disk" and enabling memory hole remapping (so Vista can see all of my RAM), it no longer allows me to get into the BIOS, only goes to a flashing cursor when I try, but it will boot to the OS just fine.

An update to my adventures with this board, it does not play very well with quads.

Last night I installed a QX6700 into this board and noticed two oddities with it. First, the board can't seem to figure out that my chip has an unlocked multiplier. The BIOS only allows me to select a multi range from 6-10, not up to 16 as it should be. Second, at default vcore the board applies over 1.5v to the chip, instead of ~1.35v as it should be (according to the chip's VID). I have not yet tried to adjust the vcore manually, I'll update this thread with my results after I've tried that tonight.

EDIT: Regardless of what minus-percent setting I select for vcore the board still applies 1.48v to the chip according to the bios. It will let me overvolt beyond that if I select a positive-percentage value. Have I mentioned how retarded the vcore adjustment is on this board's bios? A simple straightforward numerical value is much better than the awful percentage +/- selection they use in this bios. Same with the memory divider selection. I don't like having to do unnecessary math in my spare time. Configuring this board has been a real pain in the ***.

Hi benbaked i am new here in OCF and finally decided to talk to you directly. I have been reading your adventures with your Foxconn 975X7ab motherboard. I am very much satisfied with this board. I have been using it for 3 years now bought it last February 17, 2006 and i have just started tweaking it again last 2 weeks till I try pushing it to its very limit. So im hoping we could compare notes and help each other with our expriences with this board. I'll be posting my setup later in profile. Looking forward to your response.