Foxconn H67A-S H67 Sandy Bridge Motherboard Preview

A Closer Look
The board follows a yellow and black colour scheme that has been the norm for most Foxconn motherboards from the past. The Quantum Force boards are the only Foxconn boards that have a slight variation but we will know more when Foxconn release these at a later date.

The board uses the ATX form factor with dimensions of 12 inches x 8.8 inches and the first thing you will notice is that the board is quite low profile with a lot of disused space, especially around the CPU socket which as we know uses the LGA1155 Intel socket. A full list of CPU support will be available in due course on the Foxconn support website.

The underneath of the board is nothing out of the ordinary with a dark brown PCB being used and Foxconn branded CPU support backplate bracket, but other than this, quite bland and boring, but who needs anything more than that?

A first look at the CPU socket area gives us plenty of space for all types of coolers, and clearance shouldn’t be an issue for even the most awkward coolers on the market. Due to this board’s market and the improved technology for keeping the components cool, you can see that the area around the CPU socket is quite bare and thus, no active or passive cooling solution is needed.

The only cooling that we do see on the board is over the H67 Southbridge with a small, low-profile affair with Foxconn branding in passive form. Due to the new technology involved on this board, performance has been raised, whilst temperatures have been lowered.

The memory slots are in their expected place on this board with a stylish yellow and black colour scheme denoting that this board uses dual channel memory. The board supports up to 16GB of DDR3 in the form of 4 modules running at speeds of 1066/1333/1600 and 2200MHz when overclocked. There are memory modules on the market that run at this extremely fast speeds, but sometimes, it can be a daunting task to get the modules to run as they should so be sure to go for a brand of memory that will be most likely compatible with this board. The likes of Corsair, Crucial, Kingston and OCZ should be fine.

Storage wise, this board looks to the future, and the future doesn’t have IDE or PATA drives anywhere in it, but instead gives you five SATA ports for your optical and storage devices. These follow the black and yellow theme once again showing us that the three black ports are for SATA II which operates with a 300MB/s data transfer rate and the two yellow ports are for SATA III which operates with a 600MB/s data transfer rate. These SATA ports also support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 (0+1) through use of the Intel Matrix Storage Manager.

The board has mass amounts of options with regards to connectivity, giving support of up to 14 x USB 2.0 ports and 2 x USB 3.0 ports. The board has 4 USB 2.0 ports on-board in the form of headers which support up to 2 devices per port. This will enable you to have up to 8 devices in total ranging from card readers, front bay panels, or even USB case connectors of which most cases support at least 2 in this day and age.

Other headers on the board include the usual front panel audio running on a Realtek ALC888S audio chip for high definition audio, CD_IN connector, SPDIF_OUT, a legacy COM connector, chassis intrusion alarm which is a rare feature seen lately, speaker connector and front panel case connectors for reset and power buttons and activity LED’s.

You will also find two system fan headers and one CPU fan header of which all are 4pin PWM enabled fan headers to give complete control over your fan speed and airflow if your fans allow it.

For hardcore overclockers and enthusiasts, you will generally find a debug LED, power and reset buttons on a board, but with the H67 based boards being aimed more at the budget/mainstream market, there’s no such features included on this board. Therefore, everything must be done manually, but I’m sure we will see features like this on the P67 and Quantum Force motherboards.

For user’s not wanting to use the on-board graphics that Sandy Bridge will be offering, you have got the choice to add in expansion cards for graphics as well as the plethora of other cards such as sound, TV, RAID, and USB cards to name but a few and this board caters for the majority of connections needed with a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slot in yellow for the latest graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia. Also included are 2 black PCI-Express x1 slots for other types of cards including the ability to add certain graphics cards including some of the latest offerings from the likes of HIS using the smaller, slower x1 interface. For older legacy type cards, three PCI slots are also on this board for users still using older sound, video and TV cards etc…

The rear I/O panel is quite an exciting part of this board as it shows us some of the main features that we will see on these new boards with regards to graphics capability and USB connectivity. We see a legacy PS/2 port, a VGA port (though we do know that Intel are hoping to drop this type of connection fairly soon) and DVI-D port for monitor connection. Other connectors include an Optical SPDIF Out port, 6 x USB 2.0 ports, an ESATA port, Gigabit LAN RJ-45 port (using Realtek 8111E), 2 x USB 3.0 ports (told apart from their blue colouring) and 8-channel audio ports for 2/4/5.1 and 7.1 channel audio with jack-sensing function. It is also worth noting that the USB ports on this board support hot plug and that the USB 3.0 ports are only available on the H67A-S and not the smaller H67S board.