14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices unwrapped its first 8-Series chipset at this year's CeBIT expo in Hanover, Germany and, naturally, along came its partners with motherboards based on it. MSI and ASRock revealed their respective mainboard models and ASUS even put a couple of 890FX boards on display. With the 8 Series poised to raise the standard of AM3-supporting boards, Foxconn is now working on its own motherboards designed with the 890GX chipset.
AMD's 8 Series is designed, for the most part, as a platform meant to support the company's upcoming 6-core CPU. Still, the company knows that not all consumers will buy the new chip and, thus, has given its chipset other features to increase its appeal, such as support for next-generation interfaces. ASRock is working on not one but two boards based on this platform.
Known as the A9DA-S and the A9DA, they support AM3 central processing units and have four DDR3 memory slots, as well as two PCI Express x16 slots, which are ready to enable Hybrid CrossFire and CrossFireX support. Of course, for consumers that do not require cutting-edge graphics, the motherboards themselves have their own integrated graphics solution, namely the ATI Radeon HD 4920. This GPU is backed by 128MB of SidePort memory.
One of the main advantages of AMD's new chipset is its inherent support for the SATA 6.0 Gbps interface. Foxconn's products each have five such ports of their own, making sure that the storage itself runs at the same level as the rest of the system. As for connectivity and I/O, the A9DA-S and A9DA come with Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel audio, D-Sub, DVI and HDMI for video output, eSATA connectivity and 14 USB connectors. In addition, the A9DA-S also boasts two FireWire ports and a cooling system better than that of its sibling.
There is no clear word on prices, but both models should become available soon.
