PCB Design and Functionality

Foxconn A7DA 3.0 mainboard looks very nice from aesthetical as well as practical standpoints. The combination of black and yellow colors as well as black and silver looks very appealing. As for the actual components, their layout is close to classical, which is the most convenient anyway.

The top part of the PCB carries Socket AM3, processor voltage regulator circuitry built with contemporary components, four memory DIMM slots for DDR3 SDRAM. All power connectors are in very convenient spots and even the FDD and PATA connectors are also right here instead of being pushed down to the lower edge of the PCB, like on many other mainboards we have discussed recently. Good job, Foxconn!

As for the cooling system, there is nothing sophisticated about it and employs no heatpipes that we are so much used to seeing these days. These are all conventional aluminum heatsinks, which are help with plastic push-pin locks with relatively weak springs. What a shame…

There are two PCI Express 2.0 x16 connectors for add-on graphics cards, two PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots, and two PCI slots in the lower part of the PCB. SB750 South Bridge provides support for six SATA ports with RAID capability (you can build RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD arrays).

Besides weak heatsink retention, we noticed one more issue with Foxconn A7DA 3.0 mainboard: the COM connector on the right side of the PCB a little above the Serial ATA ports. I haven’t seen additional brackets with COM ports bundled with mainboards for a while already, therefore, it is hard to tell if the cable is long enough to reach this far away connector. However, this is barely a serious drawback, because fewer and fewer users actually need outdated interfaces like that.

Since the integrated chipset North Bridge has embedded ATI Radeon HD3300 graphics core, the mainboard back panel carries the corresponding D-Sub, DVI-D and HDMI connectors.

Moreover, there is also a PS/2 keyboard connector, six USB ports, six audio-jacks and an optical S/PDIF implemented via eight-channel Realtek ALC888 codec. Besides, there is also a local network port (the network adapter uses Gigabit Broadcom BCM5784MKMLG controller).

An experienced eye may easily spot a few indications of engineers’ attempt to simplify the design and lower Foxconn A7DA 3.0 production cost. The thing is that Foxconn is currently offering one more mainboard on AMD 790GX chipset and both these models use the same PCB layout. The top model Foxconn A7DA-S 3.0 is equipped with a different cooling system, has an additional IEEE1394 (FireWire) controller, Power On and Reset buttons in the right PCB corner. These seem to be all the differences we noticed. As you can see, they are not significant at all. Overall, Foxconn A7DA 3.0 mainboard functionality is quite sufficient for a mainstream user, which you can see by looking at the summary of Foxconn A7DA 3.0 technical specs taken from the manufacturer web-site.