14 DAY TRIAL // With less than three weeks left until AMD makes official its first processors based on the Bulldozer architecture, more and more motherboards built around 900-series chipsets make their appearance in the wild and the latest to join the party is the ECS A990FXM-A.
Just as its name implies, the A990FXM-A is built using AMD's most powerful chipset in the 900-series range, the 990FX, which can support up to 40 PCI Express lanes as well as CrossFireX and Nvidia SLI setups.
ECS has routed these to three x16 PCI Express slots, which are properly spaced to house dual-GPU graphics cards, and has also paired them with two PCI Express x1 slots and with a regular PCI slot.
Right beneath these stands the SB950 south bridge, which is used to control the six SATA 6Gbps ports that are available on the board and ECS has also included an IDE port which is powered by a third-party chip.
This is a rather strange addition for a present-day high-end motherboard, but some users could definitely find a use for it.
Outside of these expansion possibilities, ECS' motherboard also comes with on-board Power and Reset buttons, a BIOS debug display, a raised 8-pin auxiliary CPU power connector and a rear mounted Clear CMOS button.
Also in the back, we find eight USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, two eSATA ports, a shared keyboard and mouse PS/2 port, dual Gigabit LAN ports, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out and Bluetooth connectivity. Two more USB 3.0 ports are available via an on-board header.
The ECS A990FXM-A can support processors with a maximum TDP of 140W and can run 1866+ MHz memory.
No information regarding the price of the motherboard is available, but the A990FXM-A is expected to make its debut at the Computex 2011 fair. (via TechPowerUp)