Foxconn P45A-S: No Special Power-Saving Feature
The Foxconn P45A-S is a straightforward motherboard with no power-saving technology. It offers two FireWire 1394a ports and the ICH10-R southbridge, providing RAID 5 support. Like the company’s P45A, it has two 32-bit PCI slots as well as two x1 PCI Express slots for expansion cards. Two x16 PCI Express slots run either on dual x8 PCIe, or with one slot switched off and the second running 16 lanes on a single graphics card.
Nothing Fancy But The Results
The coolers for the northbridge, southbridge, and voltage regulators, which are based on “only” four phases, are conventional. Foxconn uses ordinary aluminum heat sinks, which do the job for most users. The back panel holds PS/2 ports for a keyboard and mouse, four USB 2.0 ports, analog audio jacks, a FireWire 1394a connector, and a coaxial S/PDIF audio connector along with an eSATA port operated by an additional storage controller as well as the UltraATA/133 channel; however, the back panel could carry more interfaces.
Great Efficiency—Without Special Power-Saving Options
Performance is excellent: this board achieves better SYSmark 2007 results than most of the others in our test. Given that the board also operates within a 1 MHz tolerance of the FSB1066 system bus, this is a good result. By itself, this doesn’t make a difference, but the high performance combined with low power requirements make the P45A-S an excellent choice.
