Foxconn had some interesting products at its booth, but something that caught our eye was a new addition to the Digital Life series, namely the Concerto. This is an Intel G45-based motherboard and this in itself isn't anything special, but Foxconn told us that this board will be able to do CrossFireX.

The board has two x16 PCIe 2.0 slots with the same limitations as the P45 chipset, but what Intel doesn't want you to know is that the P45 and G45 are the same chipsets; it's just that the graphics core has been switched off in the P45.

Foxconn has found some way around whatever Intel has done to prevent the G45 chipset from doing CrossFireX and, as such, this was the only dual-slot G45 motherboard we saw at the show. The new Digital Life series will feature this black and orange colour scheme and its somewhat akin to what DFI has done on some of its boards, although the orange is a bit more subtle.

This is a pretty well kitted out board, and starting around the back you'll find a PS/2 port, six USB 2.0 ports, coaxial S/PDIF out, DVI, HDMI, FireWire, dual eSATA, Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1-channel sound. Besides the two x16 slots the board has two x1 PCIe slots and two PCI slots. It also features a rather fancy heatpipe cooler, six SATA ports and power, reset and clear CMOS buttons on the front of the board, as well as headers for six additional USB 2.0 ports and one FireWire port. A remote control and a front-mounted drive bay unit is also available as optional extras for the Digital Life series.

It looks like Foxconn is starting to take the retail market serious and this could cause some issues for the more established players on the market, time will tell how well Foxconn will do;, but with products like this, they might just succeed in stealing some market shares away from the big retail guys.