Gigabyte readying no less than 12 AMD Llano compatible motherboards
We're about two weeks from the desktop AMD Llano CPU launch which is meant to take place on the 30th of this month and although we've already seen plenty of boards at Computex, Gigabyte has now kindly provided some additional details of its Llano plans. Gigabyte's German branch posted a whole bunch of information about Gigabyte's upcoming Llano motherboards on Facebook and according to it we can expect 12 new boards with the A75 and A55 chipsets.
However, it seems like Gigabyte is starting to divide up its products into different sub-categories and although we can understand that the rising price in raw materials have something to do with it, it's getting a little bit confusing for consumers. It's not as if Gigabyte is trying to hide the fact that its new Llano boards will fit in to the Ultra Durable 3, Ultra Durable 2 and Ultra Durable 1 sub-categories, but a lot of people wouldn't know what the difference is.
There are only three Ultra Durable 3 boards, namely the A75-UD4H, the A75M-UD2H (mATX) and the A75N-USB3 (mini ITX). Of course, if you're an avid VR-Zone reader, you'll already know that we've seen the first two boards
A quick look at Gigabyte's A75 motherboards, just ahead of Computex, but judging by the slides, a few things have been changed on the A75-UD4H, but more on that a little bit later.
The Ultra Durable 2 boards include the A75-D3H, A75-DS3P, A75M-D2H (mATX) and A55-DS3P. We don't know much about these models beyond the A75-D3H which was previewed by Hexus.net, also just before Computex. The obvious difference between the A75-D3H and the A75-UD4H besides having slightly less copper in the PCB layers include the loss of two of the four front USB 3.0 ports, but there are still four ports around the back, no FireWire and no DisplayPort connectors, a slightly more basic PWM design and finally one of the x1 PCI Express slots was changed for a PCI slot.
The Ultra Durable 1 boards consist of the A75M-S2V (mATX), A55-S3P, A55M-S2HP (mATX), A55M-S2H (mATX) and A55M-S2V (mATX). Sadly we can't offer much in terms of details of any of these boards and the only thing we really know is that they're using regular solid capacitors rather than Japanese made capacitors, a concern for overclockers but unlikely to be an issue for your average consumer.
So what about the changes to the A75-UD4H? Well, not much has changed since we saw an early board at the back-end of May, but the red ports at the back have been replaced by yellow ones. What we didn't know back then as well was that Gigabyte has kitted out the board with a dual-link DVI port and claims that this is a world's first. The benefit of this is that you can either drive a display with a resolution higher than 1920x1200/2048x1152 or and possibly more importantly in this case, a 3D display. What some of you might not know is that 3D displays require either an HDMI 1.4a port or a dual-link DVI port as you're sending twice as much information to the screen compared to a non 3D display.
The board also supports AMD's Radeon Dual Graphics as well as CrossFire. This means that you could get an APU to start with, then add a graphics card for a performance boost and then a second graphics card to take things even further. Gigabyte claims a 3DMark Vantage P score of about 4,000 points for AMD's A8-3850 APU for this board using 4GB of DDR3-1866MHz memory, although this can be boosted to 5,600 3DMarks by overclocking the APU. Adding a Radeon HD 6670 graphics card boosts the score to 10,173 points which seem like pretty decent performance for what should be an affordable combination, even though the APU is the top of the line model. Gigabyte is suggesting that this combination offers a US$40-60 saving compared to getting a similar performing graphics card.
The final slide we decided to include here shows the performance difference that can be expected by combining one of AMD's desktop APU's with a discrete graphics card and although it's a smaller performance boost on the high-end, it's a pretty impressive performance boost on the low-end, especially considering that AMD's A4 APU is apparently outperforming its own Radeon HD 6450 graphics card in 3DMark Vantage. Hit the source link for a few more slides, although you do need a Facebook account to see them.
Source: Gigabyte Deutschland Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?...44701332264147
Gigabyte readying no less than 12 AMD Llano compatible motherboards
Reply With Quote
Posting Permissions
