When it comes to buying a new Core i7 motherboard, Foxconn is clear that one size does not fit all. It has come up with three distinct groups of motherboard that use the Intel X58 chipset. Renaissance and Renaissance II are Digital life models with full Dolby surround sound audio. Blood Rage and Blood Rage GTi support four PCI Express 2.0 graphics slots that allow the avid gamer to pack in a stack of graphics cards, and there are other goodies such as an X-Fi audio riser card.

In the mid-range we have Flaming Blade and Flaming Blade GTi, with dual PCI Express 2.0 graphics slots with support for both CrossFireX and SLI. The GTi sounds as though it should be the sporty model with extra go-fast stripes but it is, in fact, the more basic model of the two. In essence the Flaming Blade that we are reviewing is a GTi with an array of extra gadgets such as a second Gigabit LAN port, two eSATA ports on the I/O panel and micro buttons for Clear CMOS, Power and Reset.

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One notable feature of the Flaming Blade and Blood Rage models is that they have three DDR3 memory slots where most Core i7 motherboards have six slots. Intel is the odd one out as its DX58SO has four slots. Foxconn says that the three slots can support up to 12GB of DDR3-1800 and you can buy a 6GB triple channel RAM kit for little more than £100 so the three slots don't act as a limitation.

There is plenty of room on the Flaming Blade for the various ports and connectors but we don't get the sense of space that we would have hoped for, considering that there are only three memory slots and two graphics slots.

The I/O panel carries eight USB ports, dual Gigabit LAN, two eSATA, one PS/2 port for a keyboard and six analogue jacks and optical S/PDIF for the Realtek surround sound audio. There's no Firewire on the Flaming Blade and you don't get any brackets in the package to make use of the two USB headers on the board. If you have case-mounted USB ports you'll be just fine.

The layout of the board doesn't suffer from anything that could be classed as a problem but we weren't completely happy with two aspects of the design. The eight-pin EATX power connector is too close to the CPU socket for our taste and the six SATA connectors stand vertically when we much prefer the laid-down alternative.

Foxconn makes a feature of the Quantum section in the BIOS where the overclocker will find almost every feature they could hope to see in terms of voltage and clock settings. The notable exception is that the Quantum BIOS doesn't include preset profiles, so you have to work out the settings for yourself.

We were able to raise the speed of our Core i7 965 Extreme from 3.2GHz to 3.78GHz at 27x140MHz, which is slightly less than we achieved with the more expensive Blood Rage GTi that reached 27x150MHz, or 4.05GHz. There's a significant difference between the two models, as Flaming Blade has six-phase power regulation while the Blood Rage has 12-phase, but we would have hoped that the extra hardware would be worth more than 10MHz on the base clock speed.

Flaming Blade is a budget version of the more expensive Blood Rage and it delivers plenty of performance and a decent list of features at a fair price. There's nothing about Flaming Blade that stands out as an actual problem, but neither is there anything that really grabs our attention. Which is, perhaps, what you'd expect of a mid-range board.