Product Reviews

Onboard graphics provide a cheap and easy way of building a PC if you're not interested in playing games. Foxconn's RC4107MA-RS2 microATX motherboard lets you do that in a small case with any Intel LGA775 processor that has an 800MHz frontside bus.

While most motherboards with onboard graphics use Nvidia or Intel chips, Foxconn has opted for ATI's Radeon Xpress 200 with integrated X300-based graphics. It provides a single analogue output for connecting a monitor.

As you'd expect from an integrated graphics chipset, the 3D performance isn't very good and it failed our Doom 3 test. Dropping the resolution to 640x480 speeded things up, but it still juddered on certain scenes of our test. A lot of this is down to the X300's four pixel pipelines and the fact that it has to share system memory.

Fortunately, there's a PCI-E x16 slot, so you can install a dedicated graphics card if you decide you want to play games at a later date. As you can see from our Doom 3 test results using a PowerColor 7800 GT, this motherboard lagged slightly behind our reference PC by a couple of frames.

Performance

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from standard Windows applications also wasn't what we were hoping for. The board scored higher than our reference PC, mostly due to the 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processor we use for testing, but it scored 22 points fewer in our Shopper benchmark than Gigabyte's GA-G1975X, which we reviewed last month. It's a cheaper board, though, and the performance on offer is adequate for any mainstream application.

As the RC4107MA-RS2 is a microATX motherboard, there's little room for expansion. There are only two DDR2 memory slots with a single memory channel. This means you don't get the performance boost when installing two sticks of memory that you'd get with two memory channels. This partly explains the performance gap between this and the GA-G1975X.

The back panel is quite bare, with four USB2 ports, 5.1 sound and PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors. The motherboard has two USB2 and one FireWire header, so you can add extra ports if you wish. You'll have to buy these separately, as Foxconn doesn't provide any in the box.

There's an onboard LAN port, but this is only 10/100Mbit/s and not the faster Gigabit Ethernet. Given the lack of products out there that support Gigabit Ethernet, this is unlikely to worry you.

Storage is catered for by four SATA ports, which support RAID for faster hard disk access or data protection. If you want to install expansion cards, the two PCI and single PCI-E x1 slot, should cater for most needs.

If you're planning to build a small PC the RC4107MA-RS2 is a good, if unexceptional, choice of motherboard. But if you want a bit more expansion potential and performance, we'd choose an Nvidia nForce4-based board instead.