Foxconn DigitaLife A79A-S

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra, HD Tach and Lavalys Everest, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 torture test on all cores and expanding to a looping 3DMark06. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

Motherboards

• Foxconn A79A-S (AMD 790FX, SB750)
  
• Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe (AMD 790FX, SB600)
  
• Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H (AMD 790GX, SB750)
  
• Asus CrossHair II (nForce 780a SLI MCP)

Common Components:

• AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition (4x2.5GHz)
  
• 2GB DDR2 1,066Hz at 5-5-5-15-2T (128-bit Ganged)
  
• Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX
  
• ATI Radeon HD 4870 in CrossFireX
  
• PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W PSU
  
• Seagate 7200.10 250GB SATA hard drive
  
• Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit SP1
  
• Nvidia Forceware 175.19 WHQL
  
• ATI Catalyst 8.7 WHQL