14 DAY TRIAL // Shortly after AMD had announced the release of its five new southbridge chipsets, another chipsets manufacturer, Foxconn, made public the release of two AMD 770 based motherboards, the A78AX family of low-end, low cost and low power chipsets for AMD processors. This event makes Foxconn the first motherboard manufacturer to use the SB700 southbridge on its entire AMD-7 chipset series. The two motherboards are A78AX-S and A78AX-K, the difference being made by the 7+1 HD Audio Channel for the first and only 5+1 HD Audio Channel for A78AX-K.
These two motherboards provide support for AM2 and AM2+ processors and have no integrated graphics card. That should be good, but they also don't offer any CrossFire support, as they feature only one PCIe Gen2.0 x16 slot, which lowers our video performance expectations. Yet, there is still 16GB/s of bandwidth provided, 8GB/s in each direction and also Gen1 compatibility, so the existing PCIe Gen1 cards can be plugged into these Gen2.0 slots.
The A78AX motherboards family has also been configured to provide 6 SATAII connectors, Gigabit Ethernet interface, two DDR2 1066MHz slots and up to 10 USB2.0 ports. Both motherboards come with FoxOne Premium solution, HyperTransport 3.0 technology and AMD Overdrive. These features enable overclocking, fan control, system monitoring and benchmarking, making it easy to tune up and rate the system's performance.
The FoxOne solution spares the effort of navigating through complex BIOS options and enables the user to do all the system monitoring and boosting with the help of a simple Windows application. Another feature is the 4 phase Power Design, which provides motherboard and system stability and lower operating temperatures. And for a low-end motherboard this means more performance, which comes to meet the demands of everyday computing.
The implementation of the SB700 appears to make a little bit of a fuss, as more and more producers are interested in manufacturing mid-range or high-end products that come at high costs and leave aside the more affordable lower-end. This makes the A78AX series motherboards quite appreciated by most of the users that do not have the proper means to purchase expensive products.
