X-bit labs - Print version

It’s not a rare thing in the recent history of the hi-tech industry for a company engaged into OEM shipments to begin to sell its produce under its own brand. The Taiwan-based Foxconn is a good example of such transformation. Besides manufacturing mainboards and system cases, the company has recently begun to promote its own barebone systems.

And today we’re going to review a barebone model Foxconn puts its main stake on. It’s called E-bot. The very name of the system – without those typical abbreviations or numerical indexes – says we deal with something unusual here. Let’s see how different this E-bot really is.

Specification and Accessories

Exterior and Functionality

This model seems to have pretensions to originality and quite successfully so. Yes, developers from many companies are now avoiding straight lines when designing barebones, but the E-bot is truly something exceptional. It is even hard to tell what geometrical shape its profile copies: it looks like a square with one angle splayed. It is splayed so heavily that a corner of the mainboard had to be cut off. The outline of the barebone is streamlined, with one edge smoothly transitioning into another. Strangely enough, the E-bot may bring up associations with a toaster – it only lacks the lever and the two slits above. But the E-bot has a useful handle on its top panel instead such slits.

The front panel carries a card-reader, a small LCD display, a few connectors and buttons and the eject button of the optical drive. Besides the traditional Power On/Off and Reset buttons there’re also playback/pause, previous/next track, and stop buttons and a volume control almost in the center of the front panel. The fact is the E-bot’s read-only memory contains a special Mini OS whose function is to play Audio CDs and MP3s. That is, you don’t have to boot the main OS, for example Windows XP, for playing music in these formats. You just insert a disc and press the Play button. That’s not the only use of these buttons, though. After you install the SuperMedia utility found on the CD with drivers, the buttons begin to control almost any software player. The Mini OS or the media player can output to the LCD display located under the buttons.

When the barebone is in the Stand-by mode, this display shows an elliptical clock with arrows. When the barebone is working, the display shows a funny penguin running around.

Another distinguishing feature of the E-bot is its integrated card-reader that supports almost all of the modern flash card formats. The reader is located at the top of the front panel, under a small cover. To access the reader, just press on the PUSH label on the case.

At the bottom of the front panel, under another cover, there are two more USB ports, an audio input, an audio output, and a 4-pin FireWire port.

The LCD display serves as an indicator that the system is turned on; the HDD activity indicator is missing. Don’t search for a bay to place your floppy drive in – the developers must have decided that no one used diskettes anymore.

Besides these connectors there is also a ventilation grid, a padlock of the removable side panel, and two slits for the expansion slots originally filled with decorative covers.

The E-bot comes with a preinstalled combo-drive of the “slim” form-factor. This drive can read CDs and single-layer DVDs and can burn CD blanks at 1x-24x speeds.

The barebone is powered up by an external power supply which resembles those employed with notebooks, but smaller. The PSU can yield 200 watts of power, which is quite sufficient for all the components of a mini-computer like the E-bot. The power supply is cooled by a 20mm fan protected by a metal grid.

Assembly Tips

Foxconn is known to stick to the “Without Tools!” rule when designing its system cases. That is, it should be possible to assemble the system with your bare hands, without any screwdrivers, pliers, etc. This approach makes the life easier for people who are building their computer system on their own. Why this digression? Because the E-bot seems to have been made by the same rule. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do completely without tools (a screwdriver proved to be necessary), but we had to do much less screwing up than during an assembly of an average barebone. But we’re anticipating…

Before arming ourselves with patience and a screwdriver, we had a glance into the Installation Guide (the E-bot doesn’t offer you any brief versions – only the full version of the Guide). This small orange booklet contains the usual comics with arrows and terse comments. The photographs are colorful and large, but a bit confusing at times. The hand in an antistatic glove covers up just the detail that should have been shown. But overall the Guide is quite informative. Having read it through, we can try to assemble a computer. The bare minimum of things necessary to transform a lifeless barebone into an operational machine includes a CPU, memory and a hard drive. Let’s deal with each component one by one. To install the system’s “brain” (a Pentium 4 3.2MHz on the Northwood core in our case) with its cooling system (we’ll discuss it in a separate section) we had to extract the mainboard out of the system case and remove the back panel of the case. But we did this without unfastening numerous screws and so on. It only took a push on a projection inside the case and the mainboard with the rear panel moved out along the guides. That’s a clear example of the “tool-less” assembly principle! There are special guides in the rear panel the mainboard is attached to. The mainboard already has a plastic retention for the CPU cooler to be fastened to with two steel brackets.

It’s all right, but the brackets are rather too close to the cooler’s sole and they look as if going to slip off any moment. We have had to use our screwdriver four times only by now, to fasten the cooler’s fan to the rear panel of the system case. The memory modules are installed in the ordinary fashion – just put one into an empty slot and lock it with a latch. Now you can close the side wall of the case.

What about the hard drive? You don’t have to get inside the E-bot to install a HDD. You just turn the barebone upside down and see a cover with many vent holes in its bottom.

Open it up and take out a small container, all vent-holed, too. This is the place for the hard drive to be installed into.

You put it there, fasten it with four screws and attach the IDE and power cables (they stick out of the case), and that’s all – you can put the container back. Frankly speaking, you still have to open the side wall of the case to replace the hard drive, in order to unblock the container with the installed device. After you’ve gone through the above-described procedures, attach the necessary external cables and power the E-bot up.

All in all, the design concept the E-bot is based upon is clever, but not quite well implemented. The details of the system case do not fit to each other perfectly, so you will often find yourself applying some force to fasten or move a component. We hope, though, that upcoming barebone models from Foxconn will have a higher quality of manufacture.

Temperature and Noise

The documentation on the barebone keeps silent about any special technologies for less noise and better cooling. They must have put all their effort into the design of the case. And yet, it would be better to have a quiet home computer rather than an overheating reaction turbine, however spectacular it may look. So, this section is about the noise-temperature characteristics of the E-bot, especially because its specification doesn’t suggest a very high performance.

So, the active cooling system of the E-bot consists of two parts: a CPU cooler (it also cools the entire inside of the system case) and a North Bridge cooler. The South Bridge is cooled by a passive heatsink, and there are also vent holes in the bottom and side panels of the case. The North Bridge cooler is an ordinary 40mm fan fastened to an aluminum heatsink. This cooler is fastened to the mainboard by means of steel wire that holds on two loops in the textolite. The North Bridge chip is cooled actively because it contains an integrated graphics core.

The CPU cooler is quite another story. It is a design masterpiece that also cools the entire system case.

That is, one 80mm fan takes heat off the CPU and exhausts warm air from inside the case. Here’s how it works: three copper pipes go out of the aluminum sole of the CPU cooler to transfer heat to the aluminum heatsink. Now, the most important thing: in the assembled system the heatsink is situated right between the aforementioned fan and the vent grid in the back panel. Hot air is sucked in from the case by the fan and is blown through the heatsink and is then exhausted.

It seems fine, but systems on heat pipes are not yet really good coolers. A fan can improve the situation but only if its purpose is to cool the CPU alone. It’s not so in our case. Moreover, the cooler’s sole is finished downright inaccurately:

As you can see, the surface is all uneven as if someone spilled molten metal on it. Of course, this worsens the heat contact. We don’t know if it’s a defect of the particular sample or an indication of a bad quality of manufacture overall, but the cooling system looks suspicious.

To check up this cooler we carried out a small experiment. We started the assembled system up having disabled the 80mm fan. If there’s really bad contact between the cooler’s sole and the CPU, the CPU temperature should jump suddenly. Or the system wouldn’t start up at all due to overheat. The barebone did start up, however, and we ran the monitoring program from the SiS SuperUtility Pro bundle (we’ll talk about it shortly) and – a miracle! – the temperature of the idle CPU didn’t change even by a single degree. It remained a mystery if the thermal paste included with the barebone or anything else was the reason.

Without the fan the cooler behaved like many other passive coolers on heat pipes do. Our launching S’n’M led to a sudden increase of the CPU temperature till it got too high and the system shut down automatically. On the other hand, a majority of quality passive coolers can keep the temperature just below the highest limit, though. So, that’s another indication that the quality of the E-bot’s CPU cooler is below average.

Another device that often suffers from lack of cool air in mini-systems is the hard disk drive. In the E-bot, the hard drive is placed at the bottom of the case so that the cool air coming through the vent holes in the bottom cooled it the first thing.

You can see the results of our temperature tests below, but we want first to say a few words about the noise parameters of this barebone. You can reduce the noise of an air-based cooling system by reducing the speed of the fans or by decreasing the friction in the fans’ engines. Friction is a parameter that can hardly be improved, so low speeds is the only way to building a quiet computer. The E-bot offers you two options: to set the fan speeds at their maximums, or to set them to some average value which is not changed irrespective of the load on the system. You can do this in the BIOS. In the first case the E-bot sounds like a taking-off jetliner, yet the high speeds don’t practically affect the cooling efficiency. In the second case the noise is more tolerable. The external power supply brings more noise when its fan reaches its max speed from time to time, and you cannot control that. But overall the noise from the system is quite acceptable.

FSB frequency	Idle		S’n’M		3Dmark 2001SE		HDD temperature
FSB frequency	CPU	SYS	CPU	SYS	CPU	SYS	HDD temperature
200MHz	25	34	51	36	38	35	37
212MHz	25	34	52	36	40	35	37

The speeds of the fans remained constant during the tests: 2860rpm of the CPU fan and 5444 of the North Bridge fan. The increase of the temperature by 20°C means the fan is not fast enough to cool the CPU normally. That’s no good news for the cooling system of the E-bot.

Now we want to add a few words on the monitoring program you receive with the E-bot in the SuperUtility Pro bundle.

The program is called SuperStep and does the following: it keeps track of the system’s two thermal diodes and the speeds of the fans, allows setting the FSB frequency, displays the effective frequencies of the CPU as well as the AGP and PCI busses, and outputs all the basic voltages. It can also warn the user when some parameter is out of the norm. That’s an extensive list of functions of course. The only things SuperStep cannot do are keeping log files or drawing statistical graphs.

Mainboard PCB Design

The mainboard the E-bot is based upon seems to be an integral part of the whole concept of this barebone, so we’re going to discuss it as such.

Mainboards for barebones are usually standard, incorporating general engineering solutions, typical forms and sizes, but it’s different with Foxconn’s creation. Just take a look at the outline – do you often see mainboards with a corner cut off? This was done for the mainboard to fit into the case, as we said above. The hottest components, i.e. the processor, memory and North Bridge, are moved as far away from other components as the small PCB area permits, for better airflows. This placement isn’t perfect, though. The memory slots are near the front panel of the case, and the airflow from the bottom to the real panel of the case is passing some distance away from them, leaving the memory unattended.

Another minor drawback is that in the assembled system the fastening bracket of the CPU heatsink hangs somewhat above the North Bridge’s fan, thus hindering airflow. It’s even worse with the CPU voltage regulator elements that are placed under the CPU heatsink, which protrudes far off the CPU socket. The fan doesn’t fit too firmly to the heatsink and creates some airflow around the regulator’s elements, but that’s not enough. Moreover, the heat pipes stretching from the cooler’s sole go right above them.

In brief, the elements of all the three power channels are scorching hot at work. All the connectors found at the barebone’s back panel are located below the heatsink. We’ve already discussed them in the beginning of the article.

The elements that don’t dissipate much heat, and all the connectors and expansion slots too, are grouped at the bottom part of the mainboard’s PCB. Two connections seem to be located properly: the IDE cable and the power cables of the hard drive and the optical drive. The IDE connector is located near the devices that attach to it. The IDE cable folded at a 90-degree angle lies on the optical drive and takes almost no space inside the case.

As for the power cord, it’s small and doesn’t occupy much space in the case. Since the E-bot uses an external power source, the IDE devices are powered by a Molex “male” connector a cord with three Molex “female” connectors is attached to. All the power cables are color-coded according to the ATX standard. The rest of the connectors are located rather inconveniently, since their cables either stretch through the entire case or create such a mess that it becomes difficult to access the mainboard. For example, you can only handle the Clear CMOS jumper with tweezers and a flashlight.

The PCI expansion slot is placed in such a way that the nearby cables will lie on the installed card, which is undesirable.

Mainboard Features

The developers of the E-bot didn’t bother much about the functionality of the mainboard – how else can you explain their using a Socket 478 platform and six-channel sound? Either the mainboard is part of the original E-bot concept or it was assembled from what was left in their storehouses. Or probably both explanations are correct.

The mainboard is based on the SiS 661FX chipset with the integrated graphics core Real256E. The combination of the 661 (North Bridge) and 963 (South Bridge) chips employed here is rather rare: the 661 is usually accompanied with the more advanced 964 South Bridge. The Bridges are joined with the exclusive MuTOIL bus (16 bits, 1GB/s bandwidth). The memory controller integrated into the North Bridge is single-channel. The mainboard carries two memory slots you can plug modules of DDR400/333/266 SDRAM into. The AGP 4x/8x controller of the 661FX chip supports only 1.5V graphics cards. The integrated graphics core is accelerated by means of Ultra-AGPII technology which, quoting SiS, helps the core communicate with the memory at the speed of the memory, i.e. at 3.2GB/s (if DDR400 SDRAM is installed). The maximum clock rate of the Real256E is 200MHz, and this graphics core doesn’t support pixel shaders at all. The mainboard also offers the following slots and connectors, supported by the South Bridge:

The USB and FireWire ports are located on the front and rear panels of the system case – none of them is left as a header on the mainboard’s PCB. The rest of the 661FXSA’s functions are courtesy of external controllers. Realtek’s RTL8201BL chip supports Fast Ethernet (10/100Mbps):

Realtek’s six-channel AC’97 ALC658 codec is responsible for the audio capabilities of the E-bot.

We checked up the quality of the audio section with RightMark AudioAnalyzer and got the following results:

Besides the chipset, there’s another multi-purpose chip on the mainboard. It is an I/O controller IT8705F from ITE. This controller is responsible for hardware monitoring and for the card-reader. The rest of its capabilities are not employed by the 661FXSA mainboard. Well, the monitoring options of the chip aren’t fully used, either.

Lastly, there’s an OZ263T controller on board. This chip from O₂MICRO uses the control program written into the flash memory and makes it possible to listen to audio CDs and MP3 files without booting Windows.

The CPU voltage regulation module is three-channel and uses capacitors from Ost.

BIOS and Overclocking

The mainboard’s BIOS is based on the widespread AwardBIOS v6.00PG microcode. The overclocking options offered here are rather scarce, and you have to search for them. Why? Because as is often the case with AwardBIOS, the overclocking options are split in three groups: for controlling frequencies and voltages, for memory timings, and for system monitoring. In this case, you can find them on “Frequency/Voltage Control” (which doesn’t allow setting either frequencies or voltages, by the way), “Advanced Chipset FeaturesàDRAM Clock/Timing Control” and “PC Health Status” pages. Two important options can be found on the “BIOS Features” page: for adjusting the FSB frequency and for changing the memory frequency divider.

Besides them, this page contains settings pertaining to Foxconn’s innovations. Here’s a list of the options you can find on the above-mentioned pages:

Our overclocking the system didn’t bring any considerable profits. The E-bot wouldn’t pass the S’n’M test to the end after the FSB frequency had been lifted up by 12MHz. This seems to indicate a failure of the CPU voltage circuitry. Anyway, this is a satisfactory result just because the E-bot is not a platform for overclocking experiments.

Before proceeding to the test results we want to offer you a list of the above-mentioned innovations in the BIOS settings. Here they are:

Performance

Socket 478 systems based around Pentium 4 processors are leaving the top-end sector of the market, so we shouldn’t expect any revelations from the following tests.

The demo of Doom 3 looked weird enough, just like a slideshow. The system we’ve assembled in the E-bot is almost twice slower than top-end computers of today.

Conclusion

The system we have reviewed today is no record-breaker, of course. Its components are not top of the line and have stepped down into the category of value solutions. The manufacturer rather puts its stake on the original design and functionality demanded by the users that perceive the computer as an expensive toy. We wouldn’t recommend this barebone as a solution for gamers, overclockers or people who just want to have a good and multi-purpose tool. But if all you need is a multi-media center providing excellent opportunities for listening to music, watching movies and surfing the Internet, the E-bot might come in handy.

But you’ll be asked to pay for it quite a sum – Foxconn seems to value the work of its designers a lot ;).

Foxconn E-bot
Dimensions	29.9cm x 17.8cm x 27.3cm
Bays	1 x 3.5(internal)
Front panel connectors	2 x USB 1 x Mic-In 1 x Line-Out 1 x IEEE 1394a
Back panel connectors	1 x VGA port 1 x Line-In(Rear channels) 1 x Line-Out(Front channels) 1 x Mic (Center&Subwoofer channels) 2 x USB 2.0 1 x IEEE-1394a (6-pin) 1 x 10/100Mb/s Ethernet LAN (RJ45) 2 x PS/2 1 x External Power Supply Connector
Internal power supply unit	200W
Special features	Built-in combo-drive Built-in card-reader Front panel LCD screen Music playback controls on the front panel External PSU
Formats supported by the card-reader	Compact Flash / Compact Flash II Microdrive Secure Digital (SD) MultiMedia Card Memory Stick Memory Stick Pro SmartMedia Card

Foxconn 661FXSA Mainboard
CPU	Pentium4 (Northwood/Prescott) / Celeron (Northwood) (400/533/800 MHz FSB, Hyper-Threading)
Chipset	SiS 661FX (NB:661FX, SB:963)
RAM	SDRAM DDR 400/333/266 (up to 2GB), 2 DDR DIMM slots
FSB frequency	200-350 MHz
Sound	AC’97 Audio 2.3, 6 channels
Connectors and ports	1 x AGP 8X/4X (only 1.5V graphics cards) 1 x PCI 1 x RJ45(FastEthernet) 4 x USB 2.0 2 x PS/2(Mouse&Keyboard) 5 x Audio(i/o) 2 x IEEE 1394 1 x ATA133/100/66 (2 devices)
BIOS	Phoenix Award BIOS v6.00PG
Form-factor	mATX 240x232mm
Special features	WakeUp LAN

Frequency response (from 40 Hz to 15 kHz), dB:	+0.29, -0.28	Good
Noise level, dB (A):	-87.5	Good
Dynamic range, dB (A):	82.7	Good
THD, %:	0.0083	Very good
IMD, %:	0.049	Good
Stereo crosstalk, dB:	-86.8	Excellent
IMD at 10 kHz, %:	0.111	Average

Benchmark	FSB 200MHz	FSB 212MHz
Sisoft Sandra 2005, RAM Buffered Bandwidth	2744	2990
3Dmark 2001SE,Default	1777	1860
PCmark04, Default	3717	3917
WinRAR , KB/sec	237	257
SuperPI 4M, sec	258	238
Quake 3 Arena (four)	43.5	48.7
Doom 3, Medium quality,1024x768	2.3	2.6
Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo, 1024x768	12.8	14.47

FSB	RAM
1	1
2	1
3	2
6	5

Foxconn E-bot Small Form-Factor System Review