14 DAY TRIAL // Motherboards equipped with AMD sockets FM2 and FM2+ may be the ones most likely to be bought by retail customers seeking to make an AMD-powered PC, but the AM1 socket is gaining attention now too, and MSI has reacted to that.
Which is to say, Micro-Star International has officially released its first AM1-based motherboard, called Am1I and featuring the mini-ITX form factor.
AM1 socket used to be called FS1b until January, when AMD decided to change its moniker to fit better with its company name and the rest of its device line.
The AM1 socket is made for Athlon- and Sempron-branded accelerated processing units (APUs), like the Athlon 5150 (a 1.6 GHz quad-core with 2 MB cache, HD 8400 graphics at 600 MHz, and DDR3-1600 memory) and Sempron 3850 (a 1.3 GHz quad-core with 2 MB cache and HD 8280 graphics at 450 MHz, plus DDR3-1600 memory).
Sure enough, the MSI AM1I has a pair of DDR3 DIMM memory slots that allow for up to 16 GB of DDR3-1600 MHz memory to be installed on it.
That's actually pretty good for a mini-ITX motherboard, considering that the memory modules are almost as long as the platform is wide.
The same goes for the PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot. That's right, you have a full-size slot there, for add-in graphics cards.
The strength of the video board will only be limited by the power of your PSU, although, granted, the processors won't really be able to drive a system featuring an overpowered board very well.
In addition to the lone PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot, the MSI AM1I boasts a mini PCI Express slot as well, plus a pair of SATA 6.0 Gbps connectors.
Furthermore, MSI included a pair of USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet (rare is the motherboard that has anything slower now), 6-channel HD audio, and three video outputs: HDMI, DVI, and D-Sub.
Legacy PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard are available as well, because there are still plenty of old peripherals running around that don't connect via Universal Serial Bus.
Everything runs on the energy provided by a standard 24-pin motherboard ATX power interface, as well as a 4-pin CPU power connector. The CPU socket is directly wired to the memory slots as well as every interface and plug listed above. No third-party controllers used at all. They seldom are on such small hardware platforms, because it's hard enough to supply all the chip/chipset-supported interfaces, let alone extras.
