Foxconn DigitaLife ELA P45 Motherboard

 

First impressions are usually lasting ones, and again it seems that the Foxconn ELA has received the same mismatched colour scheme that the A79A-S had. If you managed to read the Foxconn A79A-S review, you’d know that the colours did nothing for me then, and they still do nothing for me now.

 

To Foxconn’s credit, they’ve managed to keep all of the available connectivity options of the motherboard within the ATX format. However, there are some caveats that come along for a ride when trying to cram so much motherboard onto such a limited space. Over the next few paragraphs I’ll attempt to highlight all of these to you as best I can. Turning to the rear of the motherboard I would like to direct your attention to the heatsink fastening systems that are present. You will notice that there is only one metal backplate for attaching the North Bridge heatsink to the motherboard and this uses spring-loaded screws which provide a better mount and surface contact for the chipset. All the other heatsinks are attached by the usual spring-load nylon pins.

 

 

Beginning our tour around the motherboard at the expansion card slots, we can see that Foxconn has included three PCIe x16; two PCI, and two PCIe x 1 slots. The Foxconn ELA supports CrossFireX with each PCIe x16 slot providing 8x bandwidth, should you be using just two cards then the red and topmost blue slot will provide 16x bandwidth. CrossFireX support is made available due to an integrated IDT PCIe switch which can be found under the small copper coloured heatsink. If running a CrossFireX setup then you can expect to lose pretty much every expansion slot other than the second PCI x1 slot. Such is the scrifice required for running a multi-GPU setup. To the left of the expansion slots is a RealTek ALC888SDD, which provides both DTS Connect and Dolby Digital Live and drives the 6 audio jacks and the optical/coaxial audio connectors.