Foxconn Quantum Force is back with X79

[therager]

Here are the great news - Foxconn Quantum Force is back with X79:

Lucky enough, we have spotted a great looking black and red themed board in one of the darkest rooms within COMPUTEX and this somehow rekindles our memories back to the days of first black and red board from Foxconn Quantum Force series : BloodRage.

[Dualist]

That looks the mutts nuts, WANT..!!!

[felix_w]

Interesting memory socket placement...equally split on the sides of the cpu...

[zalbard]

Is that HPTX or something? lol. Really wide...

Interesting memory socket placement...equally split on the sides of the cpu...

Makes sense trace length wise.

Where do I sign up for one?

[felix_w]

Yeap, i thought so...now the mb manuals won't say "put the memory dimm's to the sockets closest to the cpu socket"...

[PiLsY]

Told you they were busy .

Very similar design principals to the Bloodrage, looks damn sexy too. Surprised it only needs a single 8 pin EPS and no auxiliary pcie power for quad sli though.

Wonder what all those SAS ports are powered from? Does x79 southbridge offer native SAS or a 3rd party chip perhaps?

Itll be interesting to find out how the pcie lanes split out too. That top 4x slot is VERY handy as well - means you dont have to waste a pcie 16x slot on a 4x device (ie raid/network card).

Looks to be E-ATX too so case compatibility shouldnt be too much of an issue either.

Roll on Q4...

[zalbard]

Yeap, i thought so...now the mb manuals won't say "put the memory dimm's to the sockets closest to the cpu socket"...

Looking forward to designs with DIMMs all around the socket!

[Lord Trident]

hope to have my board soon

will have fun breaking this board lol

[Hondacity]

nice power circuit..weird its not dual 8pin eps

[Lord Trident]

why is it weird

who say you need to have two 8pins

[Mescalamba]

Aw.. I feel my bank account is going to loose some bucks. Thats looking really good.. Very interesting layout, that amount of SAS could feed even small server. Does it have a name?

[therager]

Told you they were busy .

Did you?

Wonder what all those SAS ports are powered from? Does x79 southbridge offer native SAS or a 3rd party chip perhaps?

Native X79, up to 8 SAS ports :

Interesting memory socket placement...equally split on the sides of the cpu...

Because of the quad independent memory channels, each with own 64-bit memory controller in the cpu. So, that's the optimal placement for wiring - shortest lead lengths and simpliest paths . And the best memory overclock, maybe .

nice power circuit..weird its not dual 8pin eps

The PWM design is similar on BloodRAGE - 14x35W (max) hybrid. It seems one 8-pin EPS is quite enough .

[tonschk]

Thanks God, Finally FOXCONN ditch and got rid of the silly IDE connections

[PiLsY]

Did IDE kick your dog? What's with the crusade?

[Mescalamba]

Actually it would be better with IDE and floppy connector. Nothing against but reverse compatibility is good thing.

[therager]

One more photo from thread here:

[therager]

Foxconn Quantum Force X79 New Version Pictured

Having first made waves at this year's Computex, it's time for Foxconn's premium socket LGA2011 motherboard, the Quantum Force X79, to get down to business. The channel brand of the OEM giant is gearing up for a Q4 2011 launch, and seems to have made some notable changes to the design we saw in June, on its latest engineering sample. These changes include rearrangement of expansion slots, a finalized design for the heatsink over the X79 chipset, and a slight rearrangement of the front-panel header area. While this is still an engineering sample, there is some progress - for better or worse - as the final release revision takes shape.

[PiLsY]

Well that's gone backwards in terms of the expansion slots - not impressed there.

My reasoning being I want to use 2 pcie 16x slots for sli graphics, 4x slot for my network card and the pci slot for my xonar d2. I can't see any combination there that's possible without either hitting my psu at the bottom of the board or blocking a required slot. What's that about? Original (bloodrage style) expansion slot layout was way better imo.

[therager]

Maybe the most important thing is future bios support, because with Rattler you see - very good hardware and one or two bios versions with nothing interesting to talk about .

[DaKon]

I was really enjoying the slot configuration on the pictures in the first post. The revised version, mid way down, I do not like the slot configuration. That alone will make me look elsewhere.

Am I also missing the extra molex plug on the motherboard that is needed?

[Mescalamba]

Looks good, but question is, if it can match BloodRage..

[Fottemberg]

Why 3 bios chip?

[Lord Trident]

two bios chips and one chip for all the firmware

[therager]

And the final verison is coming:
Foxconn Quantum Force X79 Motherboard (Final) Pictured

[Eldonko]

Looks like ASUS is the only manu using 8 dimms in all boards