Thursday, February 19th 2009
Foxconn X58 Flaming Blade Pictured
Over the course of the last year, Foxconn's channel division emerged as a mature, seasoned and determined player in the high-end PC motherboard industry. For Intel's new Core i7 platform, Foxconn started off with an enthusiast-grade motherboard called the X58 Blood Rage, and a premium X58 Renaissance model. Over time, the X58 Blood Rage became a series of motherboards based on the scaling-down of its feature-set. The first variant to emerge out of it was the Blood Rage GTI, and now a newer "value" offering: the Blood Rage Flaming Blade.
Pictured by Japanese AKIBA PC Hotline, the Flaming Blade shows a distinct scaling-down of Blood Rage's feature-set, beyond that of the GTI variant, with a remodeled PCB, rearranged components and colour-theme. To begin with the CPU is powered by standard ferrite-core chokes as against the PWM circuitry on the original Blood Rage, and the semi-digital circuitry on the GTI variant. A standard 6-phase circuit is employed. The board continues having three DDR3 DIMM slots. Memory is powered by a two-phase circuit. Instead of four PCI-Express x16 connectors on the other variants, Flaming Blade makes do with only two, with a PCI-E x4 slot added to the mix. There is a notable amount of changes with the placement of connectors and headers. The board reduces the use of red in colour-coding the connectors and slots. The SONAR X-Fi sound card gets replaced by onboard audio, while the rest of the back-panel remains the same in terms of connectors. According to the source, Foxconn is looking to target the US $200~$220 price range with the Flaming Blade. For reference, the third picture below is that of the original Blood Rage.
Sources:
Expreview, AKIBA PC Hotline
Pictured by Japanese AKIBA PC Hotline, the Flaming Blade shows a distinct scaling-down of Blood Rage's feature-set, beyond that of the GTI variant, with a remodeled PCB, rearranged components and colour-theme. To begin with the CPU is powered by standard ferrite-core chokes as against the PWM circuitry on the original Blood Rage, and the semi-digital circuitry on the GTI variant. A standard 6-phase circuit is employed. The board continues having three DDR3 DIMM slots. Memory is powered by a two-phase circuit. Instead of four PCI-Express x16 connectors on the other variants, Flaming Blade makes do with only two, with a PCI-E x4 slot added to the mix. There is a notable amount of changes with the placement of connectors and headers. The board reduces the use of red in colour-coding the connectors and slots. The SONAR X-Fi sound card gets replaced by onboard audio, while the rest of the back-panel remains the same in terms of connectors. According to the source, Foxconn is looking to target the US $200~$220 price range with the Flaming Blade. For reference, the third picture below is that of the original Blood Rage.
17 Comments on Foxconn X58 Flaming Blade Pictured
But it looks pretty awesome anyways.
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Nice!
Cant we eliminate FDD ?
I don't actually recall the last time I used a FDD, and I'm sure most of the peeps here will share that sentiment, so I'd love to know why manufacturers still insist on including this connector, even on high-end boards. USB flash drives work much better than FDDs for BIOS flashing anyway.