Foxconn A9DA-S Motherboard Review

👤by James Clewer Comments 📅21-03-11
Closer look continued


Behind the SATA sockets we can see the A9DA-S southbridge heatsink. It's a compact unit designed to sit below a larger GPU installed in the first PCI-e slot. Fortunately it doesn't need to ditch much heat as these chipsets are quite frugal. Controlling the six SATA connections and various RAID duties the SB850 will cope just fine under the sink.


Southbridge heatsink.


The bottom corner of the board contains the AMIBIOS chip, LED status indicator panel (this provides alpha numeric codes that allow the user to identify the status of the board and associated hardware issues) a com header, front panel header and a couple of what I can only assume are ASUS inspired power and reset buttons. Very useful if the board is being tested outside the case... no more shorting the front panel pins to power the board up!


BIOS chip, LED indicator and front panel connectors.


Running along the base of the board are no less than four USB 2.0 header sockets. As with any other board these sockets carry two discrete USB connections meaning a total of eight additional USB ports on top of those contained in the boards I/O plate. Yes they're not USB 3.0 but the quantity available is none the less impressive!


4x USB headers = 8x USB connections.


Expansion wise the A9DA-S is well covered... it has two PCI-e 2.0 x16 slots (run at x8 when dual cards are installed), two PCI-e x1 slots and two standard PCI v2.3 slots. It's a very flexible design that should allow many combinations of system installation depending on what the user is intending to use it for.


Expansion slots.


Finally we get to the last point of interest on the board - the I/O plate at the rear of the board. In line with much that we've seen regarding 'feature set' and the fact that the board uses the 890GX chipset the I/O plate is filled. There's standard PS2 connector (I kind of wonder why these are still used though), six USB 2.0 sockets, a VGA, DVI and HDMI socket, optical digital output, gigabit ethernet socket and a raft of connectors that support the onboard 8 channel HD audio capability.


The I/O panel.




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