14 DAY TRIAL // Lotus PC, a US-based custom computer builder, has recently announced its first systems built on top of AMD's recently released A-Series accelerated processing units, which were designed to offer superior graphics performance at budget prices.
The Lotus Astra systems are built inside a mid-tower ATX chassis and users have the option of choosing between an AMD A6-3650 or an A8-3850 accelerated processing units.
As many of you may know, both of these chips includes four processing cores, clocked at 2.6GHz and 2.9GHz respectively, 4MB of Level 2 cache as well as Radeon HD 6000-series built-in graphics cores.
As expected, the A8-3850 packs a more powerful integrated GPU than the A6-3650, as the former comes equipped with 400 stream processors, while the latter includes only 320 such cores.
In addition to the integrated graphics, users can also opt for configuring the Astra desktops with a series of other AMD Radeon GPUs (Radeon HD 6450, HD 6570, and HD 6670), which can be used together with the APU built-in graphics core in a Hybrid CrossFireX mode.
AMD's accelerated processing units can also be paired together with as much as 32GB of system memory with frequencies up to 1866MHz, and Lotus PC offers various hard drive and solid state drive options.
The rest of the specifications list includes a dual-layer DVD burner or a Blu-ray combo drive, 350W or 450W power supplies, built-in Gigabit Ethernet, as well as optional 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0 connectivity.
Pricing for the Astra desktops starts at $599 and the base configuration includes the A6-3650 APU, 4 GB of DDR3 memory, a 250GB hard drive, and the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system.
Starting with late August, users interested in building a custom Astra desktop will be able to do so by using an online configurator. Until then systems can only be customized via e-mail.