Foxconn went through a phase of offering some pretty fantastic packaging on their Digital Life products; the Renaissance board springs to mind as an example. This latest model is a simpler affair though, only giving us basic information on the product within. Bundled with the A9DA-S is a reasonable standard bundle which includes I/O shield, drive cables, manuals and the driver/software CD (Norton included).
Asus went for a black and blue scheme and Foxconn have opted for a wasp like black and yellow design for their 890GX board which includes a rather cool power circuitry heatsink. Up at the top of the board we have an AM3 socket which fully supports the latest CPUs on that platform and alongside this are the four dual channel DDR3 slots. Each can hold 4GB of DDR3 for a total of 16GB. As with other 890GX models, speeds above the standard AMD spec of 1333MHz are available.
Down at the bottom left of the PCB are the add-in card slots. These run from PCIe 16x through 2x PCIe 1x, PCIe 16x to 2x PCI. As with all 890GX boards; the A9DA-S runs in 2x PCIe 8x mode when cards are installed in a CrossFire configuration. Over at the bottom left of the PCB we find power and reset buttons as well as a LED display which helps to diagnose any problems when booting. Also present are the six SATA 6GB/s connectors which can operate in ACHI or RAID mode as required.
Back panel connectivity on the A9DA-S is reasonably good with six USB 2.0, PS/2, optical audio, GB LAN, audio in/out, firewire and three display outputs, DVI, VGA and HDMI. There are no USB 3.0 ports on the A9DA-S.
Foxconn BIOS
There are plenty of configuration options within the American Megatrends BIOS which Foxconn use, though few features to take the BIOS to the level of some competitors. The majority can be found in the Fox Intelligent Stepping screen. In here we can change the CPU clock and multiplier and for those who need a little extra speed from the GPU, it can be overclocked also.
