Foxconn A7DA-S 3.0 socket AM3 motherboard review

Foxconn’s A7DA-S 3.0 has a distinctive yellow and black colour scheme, which may be appealing if you want to fit it inside a case with a side window. There’s support for up to 8GB of DDR3 memory. This is half as much as other DDR3 AM3 motherboards we’ve seen, but should be more than enough any task – even editing AVCHD video.

The integrated Radeon HD 3300 graphics chip is capable of playing HD video. It can also be paired with a compatible Radeon graphics card to increase 3D graphics performance, although the speed boost provided is marginal. More useful is the ability to drive extra monitors using this pairing. Bear in mind that the large passive cooler for the Northbridge chip is located very close to the second graphics card slot, making it potentially tricky to fit an especially large card.

There are plenty of expansion ports and slots. There’s a pair of PCI slots and another pair of PCI Express x1 slots for adding devices such as sound cards and wireless networking adapters. There are six SATA ports for connecting internal storage devices. All six are oriented parallel to the motherboard, which makes inserting cables tricky but also makes cabling neater. For external peripherals, there are six USB ports and another six can be added using the three USB headers. There’s also an eSATA port, as well as a FireWire port and header.

Foxconn’s A7DA-S 3.0 has plenty of ports and slots, but if you care about such expandability and flexibility then you’ll probably want to spend £13 more on Gigabyte’s GA-790XTA-UD4. It has even more expansion card slots, as well as USB3 and SATA III ports. The A7DA-S 3.0 is by no means a bad motherboard, but unless you can find it cheaper elsewhere, Gigabyte’s motherboard is better value.