Friday, May 30th 2008
Foxconn Dreadnought Motherboard Available This Month
Motherboard maker Foxconn broke all records by launching yet another high-end motherboard this week, the Dreadnought. First previewed at CeBIT 2008, the 3rd Intel platform motherboard in the Quantum Force series is based on the enthusiast-class nForce 790i Ultra SLI MCP and supports the latest Intel Core 2 Extreme and Core 2 Duo/Quad processors up to FSB 1600MHz. "The Quantum Force range of motherboards is now expanding as we bring a wider range of solutions to the market for enthusiasts. Dreadnought allows enthusiasts to couple powerful Intel processors with NVIDIA SLI-enabled graphics cards" commented Greta Kuo, Quantum Force Product Manager. Dreadnought certainly packs significant firepower, with support for the very latest DDR3-2000 memory, 8 phase Digital PWM and 3x PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots that support NVIDIA's 3-way SLI technology. With the Dreadnought board, Foxconn is also introducing their brand new 4-in-1 motherboard cooling. The 4-in-1 Quantum Cooler is an all-copper NB-SB-VRM heatpipe solution that can be quickly adapted for passive or active air cooling, water cooling or even extreme LN2 or dry ice cooling. The Dreadnought motherboard will be available in retail channels this month, priced at around US $399. For further information about Quantum Force and the Dreadnought motherboard, click here.
Source:
Foxconn
26 Comments on Foxconn Dreadnought Motherboard Available This Month
Fortunatly, I am one of the lucky half that have not had any data corruption :toast:
from what I have read the reference designs have been fixed and the asus board is getting closer....
All I know is that it is wicked fast......I might sell my ASUS for low ball for this board tho....hmmm and hmmm
They're advertising "high quality" capacitors (nothing new), heatpipe cooling (nothing new), 8 phase PWM (nothing new), HD audio (nothing new)...
What's so great about this board?
I see dual NICs, eSATA, firewire.. a cmos battery located in a very odd spot.
..but what's so groundbreaking about this board?
I'm still sticking with DFI.
oh yeah and it costs 400bucks :P
dictionary.reference.com/browse/dreadnaught
www.yourdictionary.com/dreadnought
Paulieg, its common, asus,gigabyte hell all the top makers have abandoned products from time to time, saddly i have had better support from the likes of biostar,foxconn,ecs/pcchips and other less known companys(chaintech b4 those walton fucks bought them) then from the top names.
its a sign in many cases that they screwed up, or in some that a board didnt sell well, so they just dumped it.
if your having alot of problems with the 680i board for example, raise hell with foxconn support, they may just offer you an rma and upgrade you to something diffrent, i have had board makers do that for me more then once just to keep me from giving them hell and bad word of mouth.
word of mouth can sink a company or make it fly, more then one companys been taken down because they got alot of bad word of mouth.
Whats so groundbreaking...? The fact that foxconn used to make OEM/low end boards is. Just like DFI who started off as an OEM manufacturer.
One thing I like about foxconn... the fact that their layouts don't piss people off. Gigabyte/ASUS sometimes make the weirdest board design choices....
Reasons:-
1:-Thier support forum is really crap and most of the time you get a 400 error popping up.
Can't help most people because of the way the forum was written out, cuts off the majority of the title of the OP's issues.
2:-BIOS flash instructions in the zip file were wrong.
3:-The FLASH.bat was not for the .bin file in the zip.
4:-The instructions on how to flash the BIOS manually was written in a font where you couldn't define where the spaces were.
5:-The motherboard had the most unstable vregs I have ever come across which made overclocking near impossible without having a high vcore.
6:-Lack of BIOS options made windows take forever to load, even after windows had started.
Besides my brief experience with Foxconn
The PCI slots of the drednought remind me of the French flag.
I just bought the BlackOps version and they say the North Bridge is 100% copper it is NOT TRUE. The top of the North Bridge is Aluminum = your chances to contaminating water cooling loop when mixes with different metals. Also the barbs are like a cheap hard plastic as well. So far I like this board but I do think my Asus Striker II Extreme was much more better layout and more solid this board BlackOps. But so far seems to OC allot better then the S2E without corruptions. :pimp:
The MARS is a fantastic board, OCs like a beast, has more voltage options than I know what to do with (quite literally).
The BlackOPS? X48 and a slightly modified BIOS (Quantum BIOS instead of Gladiator?) They ditched the heatpipe cooler from the MARS (which is amazing once you set a couple of 40mm fans on the MOSFET bit) for some ludicrous "4 in 1" solution, and charge a ridiculous amount.
At least the MARS was priced the same as other high-end P35s.
The MARS is great, the ASUS Crosshair was great, the rest are just the same old board with a different chipset and a slightly modified BIOS.