14 DAY TRIAL // As Advanced Micro Devices prepares for the launch of the first native quad core central processing units aimed at the desktop computer market segment, the manufacturing company also has plans to launch a line of chipsets to accompany the said processing units in order to snatch some market share from its main competitor on the chipset market, Nvidia.
Currently AMD has on the workbench two chipsets that will offer native support for the AM2+ processor socket and implicit support for the new line of processors that are soon to come. As it is important to have mainboards capable of accommodating those new processing units, AMD must launch these chipsets soon in order to give enough time to mainboard manufacturing companies to come up with product designs for all market levels: entry, middle and high end.
The upcoming RX780 mainboard chipset from AMD may be considered the little brother of the RD790 chipset and this new product just received certification from the PCI SIG authority and now it is fast approaching its release date.
The RX780 is basically a cut-out version of the RD790 chipset as it only comes with a single PCI Express 2.0 x16 lane and overall fewer lanes to link with corresponding expansion slots. This fact, as well as its lower price tag will make the RX780 a good starting point for an entry level system or a barebone computer system which is based on a mini-ATX mainboard.
Even in its miniaturized state, the RX780 still supports the new HyperTransport 3.0 as well as every AM2+ processor that will be released while also integrating support for DDR2 memory modules running at 1066MHz. When integrating it into a mainboard, the specialized companies will pair it with the SB600 southbridge chip.
According to the news site tcmagazine, AMD plans to launch this new chipset just before the official release of the Phenom line of processors, which means that we will see motherboards based on this chip sometime in December.