14 DAY TRIAL // With AMD's Zacate APU launch quickly approaching, more and more manufactures are racing to build some hype around their upcoming Fusion platforms, Soyo being the second motherboard maker, after Gigabyte, to detail such a solution.
As it was the case with Gigabyte's board, this too comes with an integrated dual-core Zacate E350 APU, although, this time, the motherboard drops the mini-ITX form factor in favor of what seems to be a micro-ATX PCB.
Clocked at 1.6GHz and featuring an integrated Radeon HD 6310 graphics core, the Zacate E350 is the fastest APU in AMD's Brazos lineup, its TDP being rated at 18W while the on-die GPU is run at 500MHz.
As it's the case with all Zacate APUs, the E350 makes use of AMD’s UVD3 video decoding engine, which should, in theory, offer similar media playback features to the Radeon HD 6000 series.
As far as the motherboard is concerned, this is built around a two-phase power delivery circuit, supports dual DDR3 1333MHz memory modules and comes configured with a PCIe x16 and one PCIe x1 slot, as well as with an old-fashioned PCI expansion slot.
Furthermore, users can also connect up to six SATA devices, and, although there is no mention of the speed these are going to run at, it's pretty safe to assume that 6Gbps support is lacking considering the low price point these Fusion-based solutions are going to be launched.
Moving to the backpanel, there aren't that many interesting additions to report on, Soyo's mainboard being pretty bland in this regard, although it does sport a wide number of video out interfaces such as VGA, DVI and HDMI.
As you’ve probably guessed by now, DisplayPort along with USB 3.0 support are sadly missing from the package.
Unfortunately, we don't know if this is the final revision of Soyo's motherboard, so things could change drastically until it hits retail. (via Expreview)