The packing is informative and the bundle reasonably thorough but one of the most impressive aspects of the Renaissance is its design. Despite the rather bright orange used this is a lovely looking board with some nice touches such as a passive Northbridge cooler (which looks like a speaker) and a Southbridge (ICH10R) cooler (which looks quite like a volume dial on a hi-fi). There is a single PCIe 1x slot on this board and a single PCI, in addition to this we have two larger orange PCIe 16x slots which support 16x speed and two black slots which support 8x. Foxconn state that the board supports both CrossFireX and 3-Way SLI however it would be quite hard to install three high end GeForce cards on this board due to the slot layout. For SLI a two card solution is most appropriate, additionally no 3-Way SLI connector is bundled with the board.
Despite this board being aimed at mainstream users Foxconn have decided to include onboard switches for power, reset and clear CMOS. This is always good to see and alongside these is a Debug LED to assist with diagnosing system problems. Also in this area of the PCB we also find eight SATA ports, six use the Intel Southbridge and support Raid 0, 1, 5 and 10 with the two orange ports being SAS enabled. There are six memory slots on the Renaissance and as with all X58 boards these support triple channel operation. The official support for DDR3 is 24GB at 1600mhz but the BIOS actually allows selection of 2133MHz.
 |
As the audio daughter card handles the majority of the audio connectors this means the back panel connectivity seems a little sparse but this is not actually the case. There are eight USB 2.0, two eSATA, optical and coaxial audio, GB LAN, PS/2 and Firewire. Really the only essential which is missing is an external clear CMOS button. Finally, for those who want a closer look at those chipset coolers, above are an additional two pictures.
