14 DAY TRIAL // Even though the web has been frantic about the Intel Ivy Bridge series of CPUs, makers of motherboards haven't forgotten about Advanced Micro devices or its own chips.
Sapphire is the one making a move in this part of the worldwide market, having created the pure Platinum A55V.
The name may be somewhat misleading, as the A55 FCH chipset is not the best that AMD has for the Llano APU line.
Still, A55 is cheaper to implement than A57, and the Pure Platinum, contrary to what its name may have one believe, is not supposed to be some top-grade beast.
Instead, it might actually have an accessible price while still providing some overclocking features, just in case.
The A55 FCH chipset, as some may already know, boasts the FM1 socket, which means that AMD's A4, A6 and A6 Athlon II “Llano” APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) will be paired with this platform.
A 6-phase VRM powers the socket, one that has a heatsink cooling the MOSFET.
The APU is wired to a PCI Express 2.0 mx16 slot, as well as two PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots.
Also, the chipset can handle four DDR3 DIMM memory slots, although the top RAM capacity isn't groundbreaking (16 GB).
Still, the memory can operate at DDR-1600 speeds and more, with overclocking, so there is that at least.
Other specifications worth mentioning are six SATA 3.0 Gbps ports (no SATA III, alas, although RAID 0, 1, 10 modes work at least), Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, DVI, D-Sub, 6-channel HD audio, 7.1-channel audio through HDMI and a bunch of USB ports, plus PS/2 connectors.
Finally, Sapphire tossed in clear-CMOS, power and reset onboard buttons, plus MemoryFree (auto-tunes memory clocks, voltages and latencies to the stable latency setting closest to the one set by the user) and Dual BIOS. Unfortunately, despite the product page of the Pure Platinum A55V being already online, we don't have any lead on the price.