Work in Nominal Mode

We see a very colorful picture on boot-up, which may be replaced with one of your own images if you like:

You can disable the startup logo in the mainboard BIOS or remove it by pressing Tab key. In this case during POST stage you will see pretty detailed information about the current CPU and memory settings as well as about connected external devices.

Formally, we have nothing to comment on regarding Foxconn BloodRAGE operation in nominal mode. The assembly process went smoothly, the board powered on and worked just fine, like any other good board. With enabled Turbo Boost technology the CPU clock frequency multiplier increased to 21, which pushed the CPU clock speed to 2.8GHz.

In idle mode the multiplier as well as processor core voltage drop down. As a result, it allows lowering the heat dissipation, power consumption, and slows down the fans thus reducing the generated noise.

However, the potential owners of Foxconn BloodRAGE mainboard may face some problems even before purchasing the board. Before buying a mainboard as well as before starting the tests I prefer to check out the mainboard’s specifications. However, at the time of tests it turned out that there was only a brief description of the board features and no manual of any kind on the Quantum Force web-site. There was also no manual on the CD disk bundled with the board. So, I decided to check out the main Foxconn web-site to see what other Intel X58 Express based mainboards the company made. You can imagine how surprised I was when I discovered a detailed description of Foxconn BloodRAGE features and an electronic user’s manual there. Moreover, I even found the latest P07 BIOS version, while the Quantum Force site only offered P06 version at that time. Looks like Quantum Force web-site is not updated in a timely manner.

Next the mainboard refused to power on reporting that no processor fan was installed:

In fact, there was a fan. However, it was connected directly to the power supply unit and not to the special mainboard connector. Therefore, I went to the BIOS Setup to disable this alarm, but couldn’t find the corresponding parameter in the “Hardware Monitor” section. We couldn’t proceed with the system boot-up, the board demanded to connect a fan giving us no opportunity to overcome this obstacle. It doesn’t make sense to connect the fan that you don’t really need only to make the board work, does it? But, I found a way-out: I took a cable used to control the rotation speed of the PSU fan and connected it to the “CPU Fan” connector. This trick worked just fine and only later we found a parameter that allowed booting without the connected “CPU Fan”. As we learned we had to go to the “Power Management Setup” section and change the “ACPI Function” parameter. I have to say that it was not very intuitive.

You won’t find out about the complications that take place when you attempt to change the boot-up device, but as for the drawbacks of “Smart BIOS Menu”, we have already discussed those in the chapter of our review devoted to the mainboard BIOS. Other than that everything is beautiful, although the mainboard couldn’t read correct settings for Kingston HyperX DDR3-1866 memory from the modules SPD despite the “Extreme Memory Profile XMP” parameter. Instead of 1866MHz memory frequency at 1.65V voltage in one profile or 1800MHz frequency in another, the board tried to set 1600MHz frequency with a dangerously high voltage of 1.95V(!), so we had to refuse these services right away. I don’t see big problem with the non-operational XMP technology, because I personally prefer to set all parameters manually anyway. Unfortunately, the board wouldn’t start at 1600MHz+ memory frequency when the CPU worked in its nominal mode. It is also not a big deal, because the memory frequency increase is accompanied by timings increase, which makes the overall performance boost barely noticeable. It is much more important that we can increase the memory frequency on Foxconn BloodRAGE during CPU overclocking. However, we are going to return to this discussion in the next chapter of our review.