Foxconn's Quantum Force Series has been highly anticipated, hardware enthusiasts throughout many of the communities across the internet have been waiting to see what this new series will bring to the table. Our motherboard under the microscope today certainly offers some excellent performance figures but I won't deny it has some questionable features.

Rattler looks great. Black and red colour-schemes have always been very popular for motherboards yet most of the manufacturers, especially for LGA1155 have gone with a blue colour-scheme so its good to see Foxconn use this configuration. Feature-wise, Rattler has all of the elements you would expect. SATA 6G, USB3.0, onboard power/reset buttons, CrossfireX support and so on. Strangely though, there are some peculiar design choices on Rattler. An IDE slot, when we are in SATA's 3rd phase of develop seems very unwise to me. Very few still use IDE since it has been superseded by the superior transfer rates of SATA. Furthermore, the IDE slot on Rattler takes up unnecessary space - over 2 inches to be exact. More SATA ports would have been a more suitable feature to implement rather than a standard that has already been phased out.


The big talk prior to Sandy Bridge being launched this year was UEFI BIOS. Some of the most popular manufacturers - ASUS, ASRock and MSI have all incorporated UEFI BIOS onto their LGA1155 motherboards yet with the Rattler, Foxconn are using a standard BIOS. Using UEFI frequently and going back to a standard BIOS is like driving a Mercedes, crashing it, and getting a Nissan Micra for a courtesy car. Tweaking the BIOS is fast, easy and pleasant with UEFI. Why hasn't Foxconn gone with this? It makes managing elements of the board so easy, especially overclocking. Speaking of which, Foxconn have integrated overclock buttons on the actual PCB - a great feature that many are incorporating onto most high-end solutions thesedays. These overclock buttons are extremely useful for amateur overclockers, if they are programmed correctly. The overclock buttons on the Rattler are pointless. Pressing the overclock button initiates the ability to only alter the BCLK. Those with even a basic understanding of Sandy Bridge and how it operates will know that the BCLK should remain at 100MHz whilst the multiplier should be modified to increase clock speed yet this overclock button only allows the BCLK to move up or down. Why would anyone want to do that? I understand that the BCLK can be altered within a very small margin such as - 0.2MHz but this isn't recommended. It would have been far better for Foxconn to allow the multiplier to be tweaked via these overclock buttons rather than BCLK.

Moving these niggles to the side, Rattler performs extremely well. If you have seen the benchmark results on the previous pages you will be aware that it remains consistently strong against some tough competition from ASUS. Overclocking our 2500K to 4.3GHz allows for a significant lead against the ever popular P8P67 and Sabertooth motherboards - what's more is Rattler is the most efficient of all the motherboards we have yet tested. It's power consumption figures whilst under load were very encouraging. Those on a campaign for a greener planet should definitely consider Rattler!

Priced at £150 inc. VAT Rattler is up against some stiff competition from its rivals. Performance-wise it is up there with some of the flagship P67 motherboards but feature-wise I can't help but feel slightly disappointed. With better implementation of features there is no reason why Rattler cannot be improved.