Foxconn A79A-S - 790FX SB750 Motheboard @ [H]

Foxconn A79A-S - 790FX SB750 Motheboard - While Foxconn certainly isn't the first name that normally comes to an enthusiasts' mind while shopping for a motherboard, its motherboards are certainly becoming more common. Foxconn's A79A-S certainly looks like a product that just might gain them some attention in a market crowded by ASUS and Gigabyte.

Moving on to something positive. The board was tremendously stable at 2.6GHz with our 125 watt 9950 Black Edition processor running. To be honest, I did not expect this board to be as stable as it was given the power hungry nature of the 2.6GHz Phenom. We ran our normal Torture Test that reaches into the CPU, GPU, RAM, and IO busses. At the successful 2 hour mark, I incubated the motherboard. I stopped our testing at the 18 hour mark that ended at 51 degrees C. That is 124 degrees Fahrenheit!

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An entertaining read.

If you want a serious “enthusiast challenge” this board is for you! The perfect motherboard for the masochist! How is that for spin?

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I lol'd. Thanks for the review.

First Page:
"(I'm working with 7580F ambient temperatures on that note.)

Holy CRAP!!!
Someone melted Dan!!!

Good review, 3/4.

1) Pictures, specs, comments on layout - Check
2) Usability, testing, experience using the board and its features - Check
3) Overclocking, benches, conclusions on product - Check
4) Direct performance comparisons to other products - Miss

Even though it may be an old school of thought, I miss seeing comparisons between motherboards using the SAME processor. I like knowing that, by just switching the motherboard, I can get better IO performance, more FPS, or faster encode times. A good example of this is seen here in the 790i article: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTQ4NCw1LCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA== You can clearly see that, in Windows Movie Maker 6, a 790i board is about 15 seconds faster than a 780i board using the exact same CPU. For us "enthusiasts" where every ounce of performance adds up, its a very useful bit of comparison information.

Regardless, this was a good read for the sparsely reviewed 790FX.

~Aux

I read Foxconn and that was all I needed to see.

Review it again if it isn't mysteriously dead in 4 months. The chances of me ever owning a foxconn again are nil.

Modred189 said:

First Page:
"(I'm working with 7580F ambient temperatures on that note.)

Holy CRAP!!!
Someone melted Dan!!!

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I must have missed my - key. I actually typed this one on a new keyboard so I was still breaking it in and getting used to it.

Ehh thanks for the review guys. Foxconn's have never lived up to my expectations.

I gave up on that early on and switched to a USB keyboard.

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I think that should read PS2 rather than USB. (Last page of review.)

Shame about the board. I was hoping that it would be reasonable as i'm planning on a GX/FX board as my new base for a machine. I was going to get a 780 but with the new 750SB I'd be mad not to get a board that has this.

Oh and if it pissed off Kyle... I wanna see the "hulk smash" pics of the foxconn board once he scrumpled it up and jumped on it for annoying the crap outta him.

mercyground said:

I think that should read PS2 rather than USB. (Last page of review.)

Shame about the board. I was hoping that it would be reasonable as i'm planning on a GX/FX board as my new base for a machine. I was going to get a 780 but with the new 750SB I'd be mad not to get a board that has this.

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You are correct. PS/2 keyboard was what I had to switch to. The USB keyboard just never worked consistently in the BIOS.

well I liked their 780G motherboard, used it for my fathers build, but this is not looking promising. I am thinking that I am going to go with asus for my AMD motherboard if for some reason I decide not to jump ship.

just 3 ghz ? o.o
Certanly not killing the chip on voltage

i do 1.255 V to 3ghz on my 9850 =)

well, do you guys just use an hour on clocking or ? kinda short 3ghz...

Bring the mems to me ;D ill push em over 1200 mhz, my mushkin EP PC9200 5-5-4-12 does 1230 5-4-4-12 =).

On gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6.

MAX FSB GIGABYTE BOARD 1( 790fx-dq6) 467
MAX FSB GIGABYTE BOARD 2( 790FX-DQ6) 440~)
MAX FSB DFI LP UT 790FX M2R ~490 might be cpu.

Tested all with the EXACT same cpu, cooling, memory, psu's.
Cpu is a A64 X2 5600+ Malaysia chip Windsor 2mb Cache 89W does 3400 mhz on air. not a great chip

FSB should be no worry.

Memory does atleast 1200 on all 3. (ONLY A64!)
with a phenom, i can ONLY dream of doing a 5-4-4-12 @ 1200+. highest i can get is about 1120 @ 5-5-4-15. due to fsb clocking is impossible with phenoms (not impossible ) and memory controller set to 1066 mhz sets minimum timings to 5-5-4-15

790FX can do high fsb, i overvolted NB to get to theese fsb speeds, HTR AND HTR+ is overvolted TOO
tested memtest86 3 pass.
Tested orthos 4 hours, since i didnt have a 2nd sys, i didnt dare more.

Foxconn is too new in the market, but their blackops are pretty good =))

Numbers and experiences with the 790FX.

Now lets go to am2+ reviews of some top mobo's.

LEts start out with something i dont like, reasons are explained:

Gigabyte MA790FX DQ-6.
-Voltage is A pain in the ass, cause 1.3 V = 1.325 and 1.35 = 1.39. and it only gets worse, only goes up to 1.75. and fails to boot no matter what cooling. AND chip whilst dfi boots on 1.8v+ (extreme users only tho) and voltage jumps up n down from time to time.
-MEmory voltage, cannot be set to 2.3 and highest is 2.35 which isnt enough.
-PCI-E layout, too close eachother.
-SATA ports layout. all 4850+ sized cards will make it hard plugging in and out sata cables, 3870x2 CFX will result in removing vga's to get out cables(latched)
-Extra sata controller drivers for 64 bit abit buggy(MIGHT BE RESOLVED(install Vista X64 on the Graid controller.)
-Missing some settings in bios, even when CTRL+F1
+good performance,
+easy to navigate in bios.

Asus
-1 DOA.
-layout isnt completly perfect, mostly good enough, no major issues.
-Voltages isnt 100% but acceptable.

Dfi 790fx m2r.
+Voltages are SPOT on.
+There are 10000000 bios settings, and got all you ever need.
+very good board layout.
-Idle lockups if settings are abit off(phenoms)
-Abit lack of support.

the 3 major boards.
Gigabyte got the most issue full mobo, none of them are perfect, asus isnt bad, but still its balanced and suffecient to most users. dfi for more extremes, and i NEVER ever reccon a DFI to a casual user, cause its just for extreme's, maybe not on purpose, but noobs tend to not understand how to get the dfi board to boot vista. (yep bios setting for that too.)

AtkinS said:

just 3 ghz ? o.o
Certanly not killing the chip on voltage

i do 1.255 V to 3ghz on my 9850 =)

well, do you guys just use an hour on clocking or ? kinda short 3ghz...

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Actually I spend 3x the amount of hours overclocking Phenoms as I do Intel Core 2's. They are a pain to overclock in comparison. Also keep in mind that I'm not shooting for the highest processor speeds but rather the highest FSB speeds for the motherboard. We are trying to showcase what the motherboard can do, not the CPU. If I owned one of these things myself I'd overclock by multiplier alone and not screw with the FSB clocks a whole lot.

On another note, I think CPU-Z is reading the voltage wrong. As I recall the voltage was set much higher than that.

ohh.. hmm.. keke.

I know they are a pain. well, i had this experience. 13x works 13.5 works 14 x works 14.5 works orthos too, hmm, 15x works.. 15.5x
Failed to boot.
Voltage up, failed
voltage up failed tried all settings up to 1.5 V failed(Gigabyte.)

aaanyways, the gigabyte board have still not booted a phenom over 3 ghz with me, or at all POSTED.
dfi posts up to 3.5 ghz =).
To get the whole perspective about amd mobo's is a long taking process.

But i dont know what gigabyte was thinking while making the MA790fx-dq6, why wont we piss some guys off with a crappy DQ6 board. hope you guys agree on most of my points, and i have had 2 of it, and same on both.

and after reading this, i dont want a foxconn

And btw, on A64 x2 turn of cool n quiet

It doesnt disable on FSB clock on my dfi or gigabyte either. only on multiplier clock.
See cpu-z screenshot. 1.1V 325MHz fsb 1.6 ghz.

And sorry if i pissed some1 off with saying FSB which is wrong.

Kyle 9950 is a 140W chip not 125, 9850 and 9750 is 125 W same with 9600BE.

I realize this is an overclocking website, but i think the review was very skewed in your conclusions. This board either led or was in second place for performance at stock in almost every single test vs. the other AMD boards. It was stable while baking at 124F for 18 hours. And you guys said it was terrible? Something's amiss here...

If your goal was to see how high the HT clock can get why did you not lower the multipliers on the HT and north bridge? 2.4Ghz NB and HT Link is clearly risking instability in the CPU not the motherboard. I have hit 260Mhz on my old ASUS M3A which uses the 770 chipset and has a very basic power subsystem...and looking around the net that is not extraordinary.

I love this site but I am really starting to shy away from articles done here if it is related to an AMD product...

Whisperfang said:

I realize this is an overclocking website, but i think the review was very skewed in your conclusions. This board either led or was in second place for performance at stock in almost every single test vs. the other AMD boards. It was stable while baking at 124F for 18 hours. And you guys said it was terrible? Something's amiss here...

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What is amiss exactly? Please doin't pussyfoot around, put it out there.

Tom128 said:

If your goal was to see how high the HT clock can get why did you not lower the multipliers on the HT and north bridge? 2.4Ghz NB and HT Link is clearly risking instability in the CPU not the motherboard. I have hit 260Mhz on my old ASUS M3A which uses the 770 chipset and has a very basic power subsystem...and looking around the net that is not extraordinary.

I love this site but I am really starting to shy away from articles done here if it is related to an AMD product...

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Well, that makes two of us. We have been shying away from AMD CPUs too.

To put it very simply, we do not suggest you purchase an AMD CPU in the current market.

I find it funny you guys didn't get a retail box. Its been on Newegg for over a month. I ordered one for a friend and had a good experience. It was a little weird about rebooting, but after a BIOS update it started behaving.

I havent overclocked it yet. I've been waiting for the new Overdrive to come out to fix the ACC/AHCI glitch. Its out now, so I'll probably be giving it a spin. I know WIndows overclocking isnt the [H]ardest thing to do. Then again, no one misses jumpers (that I know of).

I will admit though, the BIOS menu is whack. I've been doing this thing for almost a decade now and will be sooning getting my BS in Computer Engineering . I hate to admit but way too many things in there made no sense to me. So either I really suck, or their BIOS coders need to redesign it for people who haven't memorized the chipset spec sheets (ie their customers).

Hopefully they will clean that mess up in a future update. Its a shame if they dont. The physical presence of the board emmits quality and potential. If you are color blind you might even think its beautiful.

Whisperfang said:

I realize this is an overclocking website, but i think the review was very skewed in your conclusions. This board either led or was in second place for performance at stock in almost every single test vs. the other AMD boards. It was stable while baking at 124F for 18 hours. And you guys said it was terrible? Something's amiss here...

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Well overclocking is important but it is far from the only criteria we look at when scoring a board. How well it worked out of the box, how well its' features worked, how well it performed, its' layout and overall the general experiences we had with the board all factor in. I've reviewed a couple of boards that were great at stock speeds. Totally rock solid. Even ECS has put out good products in that regard. They just weren't solid overclockers. When that happens I can at least say that there is some appeal for use in OEM systems. If the board is at least cheap enough to compete well within a certain price point then I can mention that too. Usually I can find something good about just about any board just as I can always find at least one thing I didn't like about any board. In this case I felt like the boards' flaws and problems totally over shadowed all that was good about the board which wasn't much at all.

I'm not sure what could possibly qualify as "amiss" here. You highlighted two things the board did well but virtually ignored all the problems that were encountered with the board. The board was well made physically but it was a huge pain in the ass to work with. It flat out didn't work right much of the time. I had more problems with this board than probably any other I've worked with in the last three years. USB keyboards didn't work properly in BIOS and much of the time didn't work at all. I couldn't even use a USB keyboard to enter the BIOS at all. The JMicron controller integrated into the A79A-S was easily worst implementation of that controller I've ever seen. It gave me fits for days on end. Had a new BIOS come out for it I'd never have been able to complete the testing on that controller. Overclocking on this board was terrible to say the least in terms of the entire experience. It wasn't the worst overclocker I'd seen but things like the watchdog feature never worked consistently if at all. It made overclocking more painful than it needed to be. I'd get stable runs at a certain clock speed, then I'd reset the system and try new settings only to be unable to successfuly back down to settings that worked previously. It was just frustrating beyond belief to work with this board.

Finally I wouldn't put much stock in the benchmark tests. The reason I say that is in real-world scenarios the benchmarks mean very little. In all those games you'd never see any difference between the Foxconn board and anything else as the games are all much more GPU bound and to a lesser extent CPU bound. The motherboard variances simply do not show up under those testing scenarios. Yes the board performed fine in the tests but frankly that is little consolation in terms of offsetting the boards' quirks.

Thanks but no thanks. If I was in the market for an AMD processor compatible motherboard I'd pass on this one completely. There are MUCH better choices out there for your Athlon X2 or Phenom processors.

Just what the world needs - a crappy AM2 board to further damage the Phenom brand name
I'll be sticking with my venerable M3A32 for the time being

I have to wholeheartedly DISAGREE with your first sentence.
For quite some time Foxconn IS the first thing which comes in mind when thinking about enthusiast overclocking boards.
Ever heard of their Mars? The Black Ops? That last board in particular comes ready for watercooling or dry ice on the northbridge out of the box. The even include potentiometers for voltmodding and a test bench if you want to run it outside of a case.

The same is true for the Foxconn Destroyer, too. I own that board, and it is a killer offering for the Phenom CPUs, though it comes with a hefty pricetag. Runs rock solid though.

Look for the "Quantum Force" moniker if you want the high-end boards from Foxconn.

The USB keyboard issue is probably due to the USB keyboard itself. I have the same issue with a USB keyboard at work, and I also have it at home with a G15 hooked up to an Abit IN9-32X Max BEAST. Will not work in Bios, unless you hit the Numlock key a few times and then do a cold reset. And presto - you´re in.

That said, this particular motherboard is not from Foxconns Enthusiast range, so I wouldn´t excpect it to be a top performer, but simply to run under normal settings without any problems. According to your stress test, it did so - and with flying colors. So why the negative attitude? Have you been spoiled by only testing pseudo-high-end boards?

Foxconn has quite a good tech support btw. on the extremesystems.org forums, check out their section there, I got quite good answers there - they can take some time, but they were helpful.

jackknife said:

That said, this particular motherboard is not from Foxconns Enthusiast range, so I wouldn´t excpect it to be a top performer, but simply to run under normal settings without any problems. According to your stress test, it did so - and with flying colors. So why the negative attitude? Have you been spoiled by only testing pseudo-high-end boards?

Foxconn has quite a good tech support btw. on the extremesystems.org forums, check out their section there, I got quite good answers there - they can take some time, but they were helpful.

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The "negative attitude" is because of all the issues we had with the board. We simply are not going to suggest our readers go out and buy it because of those issues and because of features that did not work and a terrible BIOS layout.

As for tech support, if I have to access it through a 3rd party forum and it when it "can take some time" I don't really call that support.

Thanks for your thoughts. They are noted. Hopefully we will see better products from Foxconn in the future. So far it has declined to send any of their "high end" boards. Wonder why? Worried about all the exposure of a great enthusiast product? We may never know!

I will commit this to you though. When you see an X58 board up for sale from Foxconn that you would like us to cover, please send me a link. I will make sure and purchase it and get it on our testbench.

jackknife said:

I have to wholeheartedly DISAGREE with your first sentence.
For quite some time Foxconn IS the first thing which comes in mind when thinking about enthusiast overclocking boards.
Ever heard of their Mars? The Black Ops? That last board in particular comes ready for watercooling or dry ice on the northbridge out of the box. The even include potentiometers for voltmodding and a test bench if you want to run it outside of a case.


The same is true for the Foxconn Destroyer, too. I own that board, and it is a killer offering for the Phenom CPUs, though it comes with a hefty pricetag. Runs rock solid though.

Look for the "Quantum Force" moniker if you want the high-end boards from Foxconn.

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Yes I have heard of these boards. I've never worked with them so I can't comment on them.

jackknife said:

The USB keyboard issue is probably due to the USB keyboard itself. I have the same issue with a USB keyboard at work, and I also have it at home with a G15 hooked up to an Abit IN9-32X Max BEAST. Will not work in Bios, unless you hit the Numlock key a few times and then do a cold reset. And presto - you´re in.

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I'm sorry but that isn't acceptable from any motherboard. If it doesn't work properly with USB keyboards then I think the manufacturer failed at something that should be very basic. I tried three different USB keyboards and I got the same result each time. Its' not the keyboard, its' the board. Bear in mind that not everyone has PS/2 keyboards floating around. For Joe-Sixpack to go out and buy this board, go home and install it, the thing needs to work perfectly out of the box. This board didn't do that. The JMicron controller was useless without a BIOS update and the USB keyboard problem still persists.

jackknife said:

That said, this particular motherboard is not from Foxconns Enthusiast range, so I wouldn´t excpect it to be a top performer, but simply to run under normal settings without any problems. According to your stress test, it did so - and with flying colors. So why the negative attitude? Have you been spoiled by only testing pseudo-high-end boards?

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That's just it. The board didn't work under normal settings without any problems. That's been our point all along. There are plenty of great boards out there that do work out of the box with no problems and overclock better. So why put up with the boards' hideous appearance, poor BIOS layout, mediocre overclocking and its' endless sea of quirks? I can understand some brand loyalty on your part if you've had good experiences with their boards but I'm sorry. This wasn't a good board at all. At least not for us. As with all things your mileage may vary. However given what we've experienced I can't see recommending this one to anyone.

I think you also have to consider that at the end of the day, this is not the only Phenom mobo out there. While jacknife may like foxconn boards, and had decent experiences with them, for someone buying a new board for a new system, there are a lot of boards out there that don't carry this one's list of oddities. For that matter, ones that don't carry the risk of these oddities.

jackknife said:

I have to wholeheartedly DISAGREE with your first sentence.
For quite some time Foxconn IS the first thing which comes in mind when thinking about enthusiast overclocking boards.
Ever heard of their Mars? The Black Ops? That last board in particular comes ready for watercooling or dry ice on the northbridge out of the box. The even include potentiometers for voltmodding and a test bench if you want to run it outside of a case.

The same is true for the Foxconn Destroyer, too. I own that board, and it is a killer offering for the Phenom CPUs, though it comes with a hefty pricetag. Runs rock solid though.

Look for the "Quantum Force" moniker if you want the high-end boards from Foxconn.

The USB keyboard issue is probably due to the USB keyboard itself. I have the same issue with a USB keyboard at work, and I also have it at home with a G15 hooked up to an Abit IN9-32X Max BEAST. Will not work in Bios, unless you hit the Numlock key a few times and then do a cold reset. And presto - you´re in.

That said, this particular motherboard is not from Foxconns Enthusiast range, so I wouldn´t excpect it to be a top performer, but simply to run under normal settings without any problems. According to your stress test, it did so - and with flying colors. So why the negative attitude? Have you been spoiled by only testing pseudo-high-end boards?

Foxconn has quite a good tech support btw. on the extremesystems.org forums, check out their section there, I got quite good answers there - they can take some time, but they were helpful.

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Funny, I have been building computers and OCing them since long before it became popular to do so. The first thing I think of when I hear the name Foxconn is "cheap piece of shit designed for extreme budget email stations".

are you sure you´re not mistaking Foxconn for Elitegroup or Asrock?
Foxconn have been manufacturing many components for quite some time, but they did not produce mainboards for the mass market under their own name until a few years ago.
I´ve owned their Nforce680 board too, and apart from the fact that it doesn't correctly identify all the newest CPUs (i.e. doesn´t display their correct name, it runs with them without any issues), it runs like a charm - even overclocked.

Foxconn does indeed not send their enthusiast boards to many sites - instead, they exhibit them at tech shows where they are tested live. At the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany they had a bunch of guys from some overclocking sites testing the boards under LN2 and with the help of the memory guys from Corsair iirc.

Everyone could look, ask about the settings, make suggestions etc... They really seem to listen to the crowd there.

@Dan&Kyle: I had loads of issues with the most recent P45-boards from Asus at work, we used two of them for workstation setups, and the boards were not able to run Win2K3 Server out of the box, one had to disable everything in the bios and then re-enable all the things one by one to find the culprit. It turned out, that even after a bios upgrade the USB controller had to remain castrated (i.e. no legacy functions, so no USB key and mice before booting into windows), the sound had to be kept off and the floppy controller didn´t work as it should.
Don´t even get me started on the memory issues these boards have.
Similar problems occured with the workstation version of their P35-board (we needed the PCI-X slot for an older raid controller).
And the power saving tools led to frequent lockups, too - so we had to disable them although the pcs run 24h a day.

Didn´t read about these issues anywhere on the web though. I felt like a beta tester.

Yeah, Foxconn is one of the largest manufacturers of electronics in the world. I'm pretty sure many OEMs (Dell, etc) use them for at least some of their products and I've seen countless components on other manufacturers boards with the word 'Foxconn' stamped on it (ie CPU sockets).

On the other hand their forum link has been dead for a long time...

It was a pretty good review but I feel that most people felt this board was less than stellar. Even if the 4GHZ B3 overclock record was set on it. It was the first 790FX/SB750 that entered the market, and it was very expensive @ around $225 when released. The board has terrible slot layout, and overall ugly color scheme. You're able to find much better 790FX boards for only a few dollars more now. As I type this, the board sits in the lowest price bracket for 790FX/SB750 at about $160.

AMD has been in a very bad spot since the release of the Core 2. The Phenom wasn't the saving grace most people had asked for, or hoped it would be. The phenom, much like windows vista, is still held in a very negative light due to a poor launch, underwhelming performance and the TLB bug.

Now SB750 and the 9950/9850 B3's helped alleviate this issue a little, as far performance and overclocking goes but the phenom is still not perfect. I don't think the phenom is that bad of a CPU in it's current state and things can only get better in my opinion, after all the HD4800's we all love spawned from the god awful 2900xt.

The Phenom can make for a very nice, powerful and cost effective build.

You can get a 9950 for about $175 on Newegg, the DFI 790FXB is only $175 and the nice thing about it, is that it offers dual 16x lanes for crossfire and support for ddr2-1066. If you want Dual 16x lanes for an intel setup you're going to go with an X38/48 and while they are really nice boards they are more expensive and if you get a high end X48 you have to factor in the additional cost of DDR3. I'm not going to even factor in the 780/790i board because Nvidia has been slacking in the chipset deptartment since NF4 in the old Athlon 64 days.

You're looking at ~$350 for a high end motherboard and a quadcore CPU. Not to mention you could to play around with the nifty Overdrive feature.

The Q6600 falls into the same price bracket as the X4 9950 but overall it may end up being a tad more expensive due to the price of the X38/X48 chipsets and your ram choice.

All of that aside most people are hitting 3.2ghz+ with their SB750/B3 setups. I don't care at this point if the CPU is AMD or Intel any current Quadcore @ 3.2ghz is going to be fast albeit one may be faster than the other on paper but I have a feeling one would be hard pressed to find a difference when taking a "pepsi" challenge between a 9950 @ 3.2ghz vs. Q6600 @ 3.2ghz or even a Q9450 @ 3.2ghz.

This could be sort of a moot point but with the release of Core i7 in the coming weeks, we are going to see the death of LGA775. The 790FX to be is a much better setup in regards to an upgrade path because of Deneb support and when AM3 comes out Deneb will work in it if I'm not mistaken.

Anyways that is my thoughts about the Phenom. To each his own, I have no issue trying out a Phenom in my own build and I would recommend one to friends looking to build now that SB750 is out. Prior to it's launch I never would of recommended the phenom and have turned at least 4 or 5 of my friends onto intel since the Core 2 launch. We shall see what happens in the coming months with the release of the Deneb and Nehalem.

I don't understand the two very different opinions that are less than a few paragraphs from each other.

Dan's Thoughts said:

Despite my huge list of complaints this board does have a few things going for it. First it has a great layout for an AM2 motherboard and is in fact the best I've found so far in that area.

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The Bottom Line said:

The Foxconn A79A-S BIOS is poorly laid out and simple features don’t work that are expected to be the norm in 2008.

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so is it a great layout or a poor layout?

Faction said:

I don't understand the two very different opinions that are less than a few paragraphs from each other.






so is it a great layout or a poor layout?

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I think one is Dan's thoughts and one is Kyles or it's a typo. I was confused about it too but never looked into it.

Faction said:

I don't understand the two very different opinions that are less than a few paragraphs from each other.






so is it a great layout or a poor layout?

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You are mistaking the physical layout and the board's BIOS. Physically, for an AM2 board, it's a good layout with good placement of SATA headers and ram DIM slots.

The BIOS, however, is weird, where similar options that are usually used in tandem, are scattered all over the place.

The physical layout of the board is ok but the BIOS is poorly laid out.

ecmaster76 said:

Yeah, Foxconn is one of the largest manufacturers of electronics in the world. I'm pretty sure many OEMs (Dell, etc) use them for at least some of their products and I've seen countless components on other manufacturers boards with the word 'Foxconn' stamped on it (ie CPU sockets).

On the other hand their forum link has been dead for a long time...

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Not to mention that Foxconn is also the reference board designer for all things AMD.

I've liked this board; I've had it since the 1st week it was sold at newegg.

Did not have the usb bios issue, neither before nor after I updated the bios.

The only complaint I have with it, is that the BIOS sucks; I realized it when I wanted to undervolt and underclock the phenom i just got. It was just dysfunctional, so I just forgot about it.

I think another bios update would be nice, but it's not going to happen.

What's does the db option in the bios for the pci-e slots do? I haven't messed with it, but was wondering it does.

bump. i think it's called "de-emphasis" and it's measured in db. each pci-e x16 slot has an option to change it.

never mind the de-emphasis question, but I have a few new questions:

This mb only has s/pdif out thru optical or coax. If you want hdmi audio out, then the asus hdav 1.3 is an option.

I have a few questions:
1. What does the newest bios for this do other than add Phenom II support? Or is that the only difference? I have the 2nd bios. I think the newest one is the 3rd one.

2. I read that it's not good to update bios thru windows? Why not? What could go wrong? It worked the 1st time I updated this board's BIOS.

3. My phenom 9850 at stock clocks, in 65 F room temp (maybe a little less), with an AC Freezer 64 Pro and MX-2 (properly applied) is usually 30-32 C (it occasionally goes down to 29C but rarely), when it's in C&Q mode. When it's running at full frequency, it goes up to 39 C. Is that normal? I was wondering b/c I would've thought that with my cooling setup, C&Q temps would be about 3-5 C cooler. it My rear exhaust fan is a panaflo 120mm ultra speed. Top is antec 140mm @ 96 cfm (high speed)

no2censorship said:

1. What does the newest bios for this do other than add Phenom II support? Or is that the only difference? I have the 2nd bios. I think the newest one is the 3rd one.

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I haven't looked at this board since the article was written. More than likely all the BIOS does is add Phenom II support. The only way to know for sure would be to contact Foxconn.

no2censorship said:

2. I read that it's not good to update bios thru windows? Why not? What could go wrong? It worked the 1st time I updated this board's BIOS.

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It depends. I update BIOS ROMs in Windows all the time. However, some board brands like ASUS, use a windows based flash utility and a crappy FTP site (where you download the BIOS ROMs) that are unreliable. What can go wrong is you can brick your board turning it into little more than a decorative object to hang on your wall or a target for your next trip to the firing range.

no2censorship said:

3. My phenom 9850 at stock clocks, in 65 F room temp (maybe a little less), with an AC Freezer 64 Pro and MX-2 (properly applied) is usually 30-32 C (it occasionally goes down to 29C but rarely), when it's in C&Q mode. When it's running at full frequency, it goes up to 39 C. Is that normal? I was wondering b/c I would've thought that with my cooling setup, C&Q temps would be about 3-5 C cooler. it My rear exhaust fan is a panaflo 120mm ultra speed. Top is antec 140mm @ 96 cfm (high speed)

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Anyone has this board? Can anyone give me a reason why I shouldn't buy it for 115Eur and buy a M3A79-T instead? Thanks