5 - Photo gallery - The Mainboard (1)

Photo gallery - The Mainboard

On the next few pages we'll show you some photos. The images were taken at 4272 x 2848 pixels and then scaled down. The camera used was a Canon 450D - 12 MegaPixel.

The bundle and packaging. Foxconn makes sure you'll receive everything you need to get started.

This is model is the A7DA-S and comes with 2 PCI, 2 PCIe x16 (either 1 x PCIe x16 or 2 x PCIe x 8 for CrossFireX) 2 PCIe x1 slots. The board incorporates Realtek Ethernet and sound, 8 ch audio. First impression, pretty decent design. Everything is located nicely. Good color-coding.

A passive copper cooler sits on Foxconn A7DA-Ss power circuitry (MOSFETS) and connects via a heatpipe to another copper sink responsible for cooling AMDs Northbridge. Under the cooler is a 128 MB memory module of DDR3-1333 memory. This is actually side-port cache used to improve integrated graphics performance.

The mainboards back panel shows off standard PS/2 ports, VGA, HDMI, and DVI outputs. A small remark here though, only one analog and one digital output can be used at a time, then four USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire connector, Gigabit Ethernet, and then analog jacks for 8.1-channel connectivity.

There's one thing I dislike here; an optical connector TOSLINK would have been nice.