14 DAY TRIAL // The summer was mostly filled with announcements and reports about Intel's chips, Arm's advancements and Microsoft's upcoming product release, but ADM chips and supporting motherboards managed to keep a healthy presence too.
Lately, Biostar has been one of the most active motherboard suppliers on this front, and if recent events are to be taken into account, this will continue.
Since AMD promised it and its partners would ship some new products, particularly tablets, in November, there should be no shock at seeing other things appear then as well.
Biostar itself is preparing two more motherboards powered by the A55 chipset and, thus, equipped with the FM2 socket.
In case anyone is looking for a confirmation, the socket is the one compatible with all of AMD's desktop A-Series Trinity accelerated processing units.
The names of the motherboards are A55MD2 and A55ML2. Both have the micro-ATX form factor, making them good for mainstream systems.
The differences between them are subtle at best. The former has 10/1000 Ethernet, while the latter has Gigabit LAN and a DVI port.
Everything else is along the lines of what those following the news have come to expect: the mainboards have DDR3 support (two DDR3-1866 memory slots, up to 32 GB capacity tops), USB 2.0 (four ports), SATA 3.0 Gbps (SATA II, four ports), a PCI Express x6 slot (each), 5.1-channel audio and a D-sub video output.
The clearest drawbacks are the distinct lack of SATA III ports (SATA 6.0 Gbps) and the absence of USB 3.0.
We hope and expect that the prices of the A55MD2 and A55ML2 will compensate for these shortcomings, but we cannot guarantee that, as we do not know what they are. Not surprising, seeing as how their existence only came out through a leak from a foreign website. Hopefully, more details are forthcoming.
