Foxconn Renaissance

Zitat

Armed with its cupcake and volume knob heatsinks, the Renaissance is a quirky little number. It provides warehouse loads of connectivity options for external storage, graphics cards and scuzzy SAS drives, which might appeal to some but to others the SAS controller will be a gimmicky marketing tick-box and the four PCI-Express slots are too close together making something like the MSI Eclipse SLI more useful.

The daughter board with its Dolby DTS support might be an upside for some but again, most audiophiles looking for 7.1 HD surround-powering hardware will likely invest in a vastly superior sound card, opting for at least the very reasonably priced Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer or Asus Xonar series. So if the feature list isn't enough to whet your appetite then it's likely that the mixed bag performance numbers won't be either.

The board overclocks surprisingly well, but the hobbled BIOS means the experience is not an enjoyable one for an enthusiast - it's several years behind the competition from Gigabyte, DFI, MSI, Asus, EVGA and probably even Biostar in terms of core features.

At around £220 there is very little reason to buy the Renaissance when the fantastic Asus P6T Deluxe retails for about the same price. The vanilla P6T costs less, as does the Rampage II Gene microATX, excellent Gigabyte EX58-UD4P and even a few DFIs if you can find the right BIOS (that's another story entirely though). Basically, the Foxconn is outshined at almost every turn by cheaper, equally or more capable boards.