14 DAY TRIAL // After months of toil on AMD's part, and eager waiting on ours, the Trinity-based range of A-Series accelerated processing units is finally out, which leaves motherboards, or their relative absence, as the only loose end.
Fortunately, as was expected, mainboard developers have begun releasing their platforms, and Sapphire is one of them.
What we have here is the Pure Platinum A85XT, a full-ATX motherboard that supports all the capabilities of the A85X chipset and the FM2 socket.
The company did not specify a price in its press release, so we are left guessing until stores begin to put it up for order, which shouldn't take long.
In the meantime, interested parties may as well take a look at the most relevant details about the product.
The FM2 socket is wired to four dual channel memory slots (up to 32 GB of DDR3 memory) and multiple video outputs located on the back panel (dual link DVI-D, HDMI, VGA, DisplayPort).
This will allow the x86 cores in the A10/A8/A6/A4 series Trinity processors to work at their best, and the integrated Southern Islands GPUs to communicate with up to three monitors at any given time (VGA, DVI and HDMI/DisplayPort).
Everything else is in line with the idea of a good motherboard that tries not to offset the whole “powerful processor at a low price” idea that AMD is trying to sell with Trinity: several PCI Express slots (two of which are PCI-Express Gen 2.0 x16), USB 3.0 (x4), SATA III (seven SATA 6.0 Gbps ports with AHCI and RAID), eSATA (one port), Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, 8-channel HD audio, and eight USB 2.0 outputs (4 as headers).
"Sapphire is very excited about the launch of the Trinity platform and the new architecture it introduces," said Adrian Thompson, Sapphire VP of marketing. "We will shortly be adding a new product to our Edge mini-PC range to take advantage of the new performances levels Trinity brings."
For user convenience, Sapphire tossed in a BIOS reset button, Dual BIOS (for overclocking without worry of irreversibly destroying the BIOS), high reliability components, passive cooling and, included in the box alongside the motherboard, the proprietary Mainboard TriXX software (lets users optimize APU performance and review/adjust system parameters).
