The Foxconn is know most in producing one of the most insane type of board made for over clocking, example of that is the Foxconns black-ops that has a special Northbridge cooler that incorporates a passive, active, liquid water cooling and liquid nitrogen block. Active and liquid cooling is in the budget cooling solution and readily available; but liquid nitrogen! You would be crazy to cool a Northbridge down to sub-zero temps and also to find liquid nitrogen is crazy enough! (You have to steal it in a lab in some institute). But there are many other products that Foxconn make rather than pure over-clocking and insane cooling methods, we are going to look at the Foxconns digitalife series from AMD’s chipset to make the A790A-s motherboard.
The Foxconns A790A-S uses the newer AMD’s chipset of 790GX that incorporated the AM2= socket with a Northbridge with an in-built video graphics chip, the HD3300 from ATI having a 512mb dedicated video memory and also able to render and decode DX10 games in mid-to-low res or high definition movies. But if you want more power in your new Foxconn system you can add one or even up to four ATI radeon graphics cards to have hybrid crossfire to run and play those high intense games like Crysis, but the only thing that this board lacks is the raw performance from the AMD processors and more in the Phenom’s low clocked quad cores. The board includes six standard SATA ports and also an IDE port; a dual channel DDR2 memory clocking into 1066MHz and also the back peripherals are lacking at least one HDMI or DVI port, but the rest are enough to use six USB ports two eSATA ports, dual gigabit Ethernet, a 7-in-1 HD channel audio port with two PS/2 and optical ports. The A790A-S is an okay board when you want to have a home PC system, but they are pretty vague in that saying; well I am saying that you need a single external graphics card, example Hd4850 or 4680 to have a display, which means you need to fork out another $60 to $120 graphics when you only use it for showing movies.
For the performance of the A790A-S is a all-rounder and also in the average rating for a home-PC system, while it still have some flaws like the solution of having an aftermarket graphics to have a display port and the problem of having all PCIex ports rather than a single or dual PCIex for graphics and two PCIex 1x for all the lower demanding peripherals like a radio or TV tuner (or any type of format in a home theatre system). But overall the Foxconn little to lose on the offering of peripherals like a onboard DVI or HDMI port in the back, for the rest it is all thumbs up.
