Aug 8, 2011 09:43 GMT  ·  By

Asus has recently announced in Europe a new motherboard for desktop Llano accelerated processing units based on the A55 chipset, making it one of the few FM1 solutions introduced until now to use this entry-level FCH (Fusion controller hub).

Unlike its older brother, the A55 was designed to be used in cheaper motherboard and drops a series of features such as SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 support in order to reach this goal.

This means the A55 powered boards are a lot less impressive than their A75 counterparts, and Asus' micro-ATX creation is no distinction to this rule as it features some pretty basic specifications.

That said, the F1A55-M doesn't seem to lack any important features as it still sports the usual quad DDR3 memory sockets as well as a PCI Express x1 port, a legacy 32-bit PCI port and a pair of PCI Express x16 ports.

The second one of these is limited at x4 speeds as only four PCIe lanes are routed to it from the AMD A-Series APU. Storage is provided by six SATA 3Gbps ports, which also carries RAID capabilities.

More advanced features include an UEFI BIOS, a MemOK! Button for recovering from failed memory overclocks and support for Asus' EPU technology.

Moving to the back of the Asus F1A55-M, we find all the I/O ports that are standard for an entry-level motherboard, including a pair of USB 3.0 ports (driven by a third-party controller), 7.1-channel audio with S/PDIF out, a shared PS2 mouse/keyboard port, a Gigabit Ethernet port and four SATA 2.0 ports.

For connecting an external display, customers can use any of the VGA, DVI and HDMI video outputs that are provided.

Sadly, no information regarding the release date or the price of this motherboard was provided. (via HardwareLuxx)

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Asus F1A55-M micro-ATX FM1 motherboard for AMD Llano APUs
Asus F1A55-M micro-ATX FM1 motherboard for AMD Llano APUs - Top view
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