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There's another piece of hardware on the I/O panel in the shape of an illuminated Clear CMOS button. You can set a jumper on the board to disable the button, so once you've found the settings you want you use this to prevent yourself accidentally clearing the CMOS and undoing all your hard work.

Foxconn has included three more buttons on the board; there are the usual Power and Reset buttons and you also get a Force Reset button. It has a similar function to the Clear CMOS button except that it doesn't clear all of the BIOS settings but instead clears the overclocking settings to enable the system to restart.

When you consider that there are dual BIOS chips on the board as well as an LCD debug display for POST codes it is clear that Foxconn expects you will spend some time pushing the BIOS to the limit. Naturally we took up the challenge and the results we got were very strange.

The BIOS appears quite conventional. CPU, Voltage and Memory settings each have their own screens in the Quantum section of the BIOS. In addition Foxconn has come up with a screen of Board Information that spells out the motherboard model, BIOS version, the MAC addresses of the LAN adapters and a summary of the installed CPU and memory. Take a moment to look at the Hardware Monitoring screen and you can quickly and easily see exactly what hardware is installed along with every setting that is currently in use.

We used a Core i7 965 Extreme processor and set the CPU voltage to 1.45V, QPI to 1.5V and RAM at 1.65V. Every Core i7 motherboard we have seen to date has a default RAM voltage setting of 1.5V but the Foxconn GTi starts as 1.6V so our chosen setting was the tiniest of increases.

We have used these settings many times to good effect with the minimum of risk to our hardware. We started overclocking by raising the clock multiplier on the standard base clock of 133MHz and were surprised that the Foxconn ran out of steam at 28 x 133MHz = 3.73GHz. We would expect this CPU to hit 3.9GHz without much trouble. For Plan B we left the multiplier at the standard 24x setting and raised the base clock but this time we hit a wall at 24 x 150MHz = 3.6GHz which is feeble.

With the base clock at 150MHz we decided to raise the clock multiplier and this is where things get weird. We could raise the multiplier seemingly at will and ran a set of benchmark tests with the BIOS at 27 x 150MHz = 4.06GHz however the tests delivered exactly the same results as they did with the CPU at 3.6GHz. We can only conclude that the BIOS hadn't increased the CPU speed in line with the settings that we used even though we checked and rechecked the figures.

This strongly suggests that the Blood Rage GTi needs some rapid work on its BIOS and until then we feel there is an enormous question mark about the overclocking abilities of this model.

Verdict

The Foxconn Blood Rage GTi packs a decent list of features at a reasonable price however the quad graphics slots aren't much use and the BIOS seems to be in need of further development.

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