14 DAY TRIAL // Gigabyte has just made official no less than 16 new motherboards that are based on the AMD 700 and 800 series chipsets and support Advanced Micro Devices' upcoming line of desktop Bulldozer processors, known under then code name of Zambezi.
Some of the motherboards announced today were also showcased at the CeBIT 2011 fair, and all feature a so-called “Black Socket” in order to be easily distinguishable from their regular AM3 counterparts.
The most advanced model of the bunch is called the GA-890FXA-UD5 and the board comes with four PCI Express x16 slots (the first two operate in x16 mode while the remaining two are limited at x8 and x4, respectively), a pair of PCI-E x1, and one regular PCI slot, all driven by the AMD 890FX northbridge.
These are compatible with 2-way and 3-way CrossFireX setups and the motherboards also pack four DIMM sockets with support for DDR3-2000MHz memory which can take up to 16GB of RAM.
The rest of the expansion options include six SATA 6Gbps connectors, with RAID 0/1/5/10 and JBOD support, driven by the SB850 southbridge, a pair of SATA 3Gbps and one IDE port controlled by a Gigabyte SATA2 chip.
Other features consist of dual USB 3.0 ports, two eSATA ports, FireWire connectivity, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports driven by two Realtek 8111D ICs, 7.1-channel high definition audio, and an 8+2 phase power supply design.
A complete list with the motherboards that Gigabyte plans to release is available here.
Until now, ASRock is the only other company that has officially introduced an AM3+ motherboard, and other manufacturers like Asus and MSI have announced that some of their AM3 boards are compatible with AMD's upcoming Zambezi chips based on the Bulldozer architecture.
The first Zambezi chips are expected to be launched on June 11 and all are Black Edition parts.