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The BIOS is the heart and soul of any enthusiast motherboard, and this one is decently robust. It is an Award-based BIOS, and as such, is designed around the root menu concept. All of what you would expect from an overclocking-capable motherboard is there -- voltage settings, memory timings, fan controls, and so on.

I wouldn't say that the 975X7AA's BIOS is quite up to enthusiast standards, though, as it lacks a memory command rate setting and fine memory clock adjustments (more on this in a minute).

Before we go into further detail, I'd like to say that one thing that we are seeing more of lately is these "automatic overclocking" options. The Foxconn 975X7AA contains such a feature, dubbed "Intelligent Stepping", and this is perhaps the simplest way to get a little more juice out of your machine. When the system senses the demand for increased performance, it will automatically push voltages and clocks just a bit higher. Foxconn has taken it a step further and given the user a variety of options for the Intelligent Stepping feature: Auto, Power Gaming, Data Mining, Office, and Energy Saving. This type of effortless over clocking is becoming evermore frequent by the day.

On the subject of booting, this board allows you to boot from virtually anything. It will work with USB floppy drives, USB Zip drives, internal Zip drives, USB optical drives, USB flash drives, LAN, LS120s, and of course regular IDE/SATA hard drives. LS120s, you ask? They were 120 MB floppies that made an incredibly brief appearance about a decade ago. I didn't know that people still had said drives around.

While all fine and dandy up to this point, there are some major setbacks in the 975X7AA's BIOS. Currently, it is not very overclocking-friendly, as the "memory clock index" (base clock speed) is not only tied to the FSB setting in a most unpleasant way, but there are only four possible options ("Auto", "533 MHz", "667 MHz", and "800 MHz"). With the FSB set to a stock 200 MHz, the memory clock option gets set to "Auto", which results in DDR2-667. We like to run our LGA775 systems at DDR2-800, since we've got plenty of fast RAM around here. If we force the memory speed to "DDR2-800" rather than "Auto", then the FSB on the previous screen gets set to 240 MHz. There's just no winning here. Even without the lock, we're still somewhat limited as far as possible memory clock speeds go.

On the down side, this means we had to benchmark the Foxconn 975X7AA at DDR2-667 MHz, as opposed to DDR2-800 MHz, like the rest of the competition. On the up side, we have talked to Foxconn, and they've reassured us that the next revision of the 975X7AA (dubbed "975X7AB") will feature completely independent FSB/memory clock adjustments.

It's more than obvious that this board has a lot going for it. Foxconn did their homework, and has scored some extra credit grades, though there are those few setbacks lingering around. Let's get on with the performance side of things now.