Foxconn launches liquid nitrogen cooled motherboard

Posted at: 12:37pm 18th April 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

After numerous demos at tradeshows, the Blackops is finally launched, offering a variety of Northbridge cooling options, including the use of water and liquid nitrogen

We’ve already seen overclockers' motherboards featuring water-loop connectors on the Northbridge heatsink, but we’ve yet to see a one that goes the next step and allows you to cool the Northbridge with liquid nitrogen or dry ice, until now that is. Foxconn has finally officially launched its Blackops motherboard, which can be cooled by just about anything.

The motherboard’s most eye-catching feature is what Foxconn calls the ‘4in1 Quantum Cooler.’ This copper heatpipe construction that cools the motherboard’s Northbridge, Southbridge and VRMs can not only cool the motherboard passively, or via a fan, but Foxconn also claims that it can be ‘quickly adapted’ to be cooled by water, as well as extreme coolants such as liquid nitrogen and dry ice. Foxconn’s technical consultant at Quantum Force, overclocker Peter Tan, said that the cooler ‘is the most adaptable and effective cooling solution ever integrated onto a motherboard.’

The board will come with all the bits to do this, including a Northbridge fan, water cooling block and an extension tower for liquid nitrogen cooling. However, it will also come with variable resistors for easy volt-modding, and Foxconn’s Quantum Flow kit, which allow you to position a fan over your graphics card(s). As well as this, it also comes with Foxconn's Quantum Lap - a tray featuring high standoffs that allows you to work on the motherboard as you would on a workbench.

The motherboard itself is based on Intel’s X48 chipset, and comes with three PCI-E 2.0 graphics slots (two with 16 lanes, and one with four), which supports CrossFire X. Foxconn also says that it’s improved the Gladiator BIOS since the Mars, and promises a more user friendly interface, with menus organised into groups of related settings. This importantly includes the voltage options, which were pretty baffling on the Mars’ BIOS.

Foxconn first showed off the Blackops board at CES in January, and later at CeBIT. However, the company says that the board has since been ‘tried and tested by numerous overclocking teams and enthusiasts,’ and that it’s now ready for release. No details of pricing have been announced yet, but we can’t imagine that it will be cheap.