The Board Layout

Foxconn is using a black six layer PCB as base for their top end AM2 motherboard. The overall layout of the motherboard is excellent, but a couple of anomalies can be found. Thankfully, most parts that could restrict the use of two very long PCIe cards, such as connectors and tall capacitors, are placed far away from the two slots. We found many features that were introduced on enthusiast motherboards before and were loved by the users, such as the onboard power on and reset buttons and the boot code LED display. The placement of the auxiliary Molex power connector at the bottom left part of the motherboard is a little odd, since it will require a cable to run all the way across the case to reach there, requiring the cable to be very long and making it hard to hide it.

The MCP is actively cooled by a low profile chipset cooler that allows the graphic card of the first PCIe slot to stand above it. The SPP is cooled by a black passive heatsink, which is tall but not tall enough to restrict most video cards with cooling parts at the back of their PCB. The CPU power distribution circuit is quite interesting on the C51XEM2AA as well. The CPU is powered by a 4-phase design, which some people may regard as bad for a top grade motherboard with all those 6-phase and even 8-phase designs about, however that is not true at all. Foxconn have been careful and have placed a very large capacitor as a buffer, in each phase input and filters the output with smaller capacitors and a choke. So even with a 4-phase design, the power that the CPU receives is very clean and steady.

All of those items used for the CPU voltage regulation take space, so Foxconn have moved the CPU socket slightly to the right, towards the DIMM slots. That makes the use of the first slot problematic if the CPU cooler is taking a lot of space around the socket, but not necessarily with every large CPU cooler since many massive coolers (such as the Thermalright SI series) do not expand their mass around the socket but levitate it several centimeters above it.

At the I/O panel of the motherboard, we have a keyboard and a mouse header, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 2 (six pin and 800 type) Firewire ports, 7.1 high definition audio jacks plus an optical output and finally 2 LAN ports. No serial or parallel legacy ports at all. This begins to feel reasonable for high-end motherboards, since such ports are even unsupported by the latest operating systems. We do not feel that one would buy such a motherboard to work with a 10-year-old dot matrix printer!