CeBIT 2008: New Foxconn cases and Quantum Force motherboards

Posted at: 10:00am 7th March 2008 by Clive Webster

Foxconn shows off giant robot inspired cases and high-end Ultra ATX Intel motherboards, along with the Destroyer and Dreadnought Quantum Force boards

CeBIT 2008: There’s very little to dislike about giant robots, which is clearly what Foxconn's designers were drawing on when they created this concept case which we saw on show at CeBIT this year. Measuring roughly four-feet high and four-feet long, these giant robot heads were built to accommodate Foxconn’s new ten-slot Ultra ATX motherboard, the F1, another concept design.

Built around an as yet unannounced Intel chipset, the oversized F1 motherboard has four 16x PCI-E slots and enough room to use dual-slot ATI graphics cards in every single one. Previously, four-way CrossFireX was only possible with single-slot cards and not standard Radeon HD 3870s. The F1 also featurs a TEC-based cooler on the Northbridge and built-in blocks for water-cooling, something we've previously seen on Asus Republic of Gamers boards, such as the Maximus Extreme. We also spotted that Foxconn's F1 has two 24-pin ATX power connectors.


As you can see from the pictures, the brow of the case's robot face lifts up for access to your drives, while the windowed side panel has a massive magnifying lens built in. 'We wanted to show off concepts [this year],' said Andrew Ditchburn, Foxconn Product Manager. 'Previously we’ve only shown parts that we’d bring to retail.' He confirmed that the ten-slot F1 motherboard might make it into Foxconn’s premium overclocking range, dubbed Quantum Force. If this is true, the huge robot-head cases might also make it to shop near you.

Foxconn also had its entire range of Quantum Force motherboards on show, from its already launched Foxconn Mars to the soon-to-be-released BlackOps board (ETA, third week of March), along with other upcoming designs, currently called the Dreadnought and the Destroyer. These aggressive titles might be a bit juvenile, but they're pitched at extreme overclockers and certainly look the part.

Ditchburn pointed out that the new Quantum Force boards use a 4-in-1 cooling system, whereby the Northbridge cooler can be left as is for passive cooling, augmented with a bundled waterblock, frozen with the included LN2 pot or modded with an additional heatpipe-and-fin cooler. Ditchburn was also keen to point out that 'the BIOS page of the Quantum Force website is updated almost every week' to aid overclockers in their efforts to fry more chips get to the top of the benchmark leaderboards.