jmke

Foxconn's DigitaLife A79A-S is a very average board: the unimpressive feature list, the adequate performance and the overwhelming level of mediocrity that engulfs the package will set you back an amount that warrants so much more to justify. Given the size of the company and talent within it, there could be so much more impressive motherboards being cranked out - it boggles the mind as to why there has either been very little effort and thought put into this product or the engineers have shot so far off the mark they're stuck in orbit.

However while it does not particularly innovate it does does offer a broad range of general features, it overclocks pretty well, it has oodles of PCI-Express to play with for either CrossFire or servers and the onboard buttons and two digit LED POST readout are useful, but I'm struggling to find more to complement about it.

There are so many little things left out that just aren't checked - the blue PCI-Express x16 slots are too far apart for normal CrossFire connectors and Foxconn doesn't include its own ones. In the end, we had to use specially long Asus ones and we doubt that many end users have the spare resources that we do in the office. Continuing, there is the SATA port incompatibility, the MOSFET heatsinks getting just too hot under extended, high power load and the continually bad audio implementation.

It has to be said that Foxconn's team in the UK were extremely helpful and supportive with our problems and even sent us another board to check our results, just in case the one we had wasn't working quite right. However, the intermodular distortion and clipping that were continual 'features' of the onboard audio and the waveform just isn't like what we're used to seeing. We tried reinstalling the drivers, reformatting and starting again and the new board but nothing could cure the issue. On paper the Realtek chipset has some fantastic features, it's just not working right on the A79A-S.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200...alife-a79a-s/1

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