ASRock Also Has an A75 Motherboard for AMD Llano

Advanced Micro Devices has allowed its customers to wait for its chips with integrated graphics for years, but it seems the mainstream batch of APUs will soon debut, something that ASRock knows well, as shown by its motherboard offer.

Whenever new central processing units (CPUs) or in this case accelerated processing units (APUs) get unveiled, motherboards are sure to follow suite.

Then again, mainboards also have a tendency of actually showing up in stores even long before the supported next-generation chips do, to give users the time needed to set up everything for the welcome of the new CPU/APU.

This occasion is somewhere in between, as the time until the coming of the AMD Llano mainstream APUs isn't far off (about a week).

Turns out that ASRock has the A75 Pro4 ready to get out there and stand against the likes of the recent Gigabyte models.

With a full-size ATX form factor, the product has four DDR3 memory slots, two PCI Express 2.0 slots (can be used in x8/x8 configuration), four USB 3.0 ports and a 4 (CPU) + 1 (FCH) phase power delivery system, controlled by a STMicroelectronics L6717 PWM controller.

FireWire connectivity is also present, as is Dual Graphics support (otherwise known as Hybrid CrossFire / CrossFireX).

Those that want a reminder in regards to the APUs themselves, the Llano are the mainstream desktop models based on the Fusion technology.

They have multiple x86 cores and would normally qualify as central processing units, only they have mainstream-level Radeon HD 6000 series graphics.

These integrated GPUs naturally have full support for the DirectX 11 technology and are what AMD hopes to see driving discrete low-end and even mid-end GPUs out of the market (particularly those form NVIDIA).

What remains is to see how the Fusion Llano products fare against the Sandy Bridge from Intel and what changes AMD will make to its graphics card line once low-end and mid-end GPU series now that they are becoming more or less obsolete.