Foxconn Digitalife A79A-S Motherboard

 

To ensure that all reviews on Overclock3D are fair, consistent and unbiased, a standard set of hardware and software is used whenever possible during the comparative testing of two or more products. The configuration used in this review can be seen below:

 

 

During the testing of the setup above, special care was taken to ensure that the BIOS settings used matched whenever possible. A fresh install of Windows Vista was also used before the benchmarking began, with a full defrag of the hard drive once all the drivers and software were installed, preventing any possible performance issues due to leftover drivers from the previous motherboard installations. For the 3DMark and gaming tests a single card configuration was used.

 

To guarantee a broad range of results, the following benchmark utilities were used:

 

 

 

 

With many options available, moderate overclocks were easily gained through the AUTO options, but better overclocks were accomplished tweaking the Vcore/NB/HTT voltages. The Foxconn A79A-S motherboard comes with an overclocking utility called Fox One, and whilst it is quite a reasonable utility, I preferred using AMD OverDrive.

 

 

 

 

 

I managed to overclock my Phenom X4 9850 BE processor to just over 3.4Ghz by simply manipulating the multiplier (gotta love an unlocked multiplier). Fiddling with the various voltage options within the BIOS and attempting to push the FSB above 210 yielded a non-posting motherboard. 3.5Ghz was attainable on the Foxconn A79A-S motherboard, but it got a little flakey when running Stress Prime 2004.

 

 

 

Unfortunately, I was unable to get hold of another 790FX motherboard to use as a comparison, and using an Intel Q6600 would have been an unfair comparison. So the following benchmarking session was conducted with the AMD Phenom X4 9850 BE at stock and overclocked settings. Let’s head over the page to see how the Foxconn A79A-S performed in the benchmarks…