14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices is still some time away from the official launch of its next generation of desktop chipsets that are aimed toward a performance centric hardware platform that should offer native support for the upcoming Phenom class of central processing units, as well as for the current AM2 compatible processors.
ECS is the first mainboard producing company to post on the Web the technical specifications of a product based on the new AMD RX780 chipset and the concerned product is called A770M-A and it appears to be the very first AM2+ motherboard based on that chipset which is leaked on the Internet. Apart from the RX780 chipset, the ECS product also integrates the ATI SB600 southbridge and according to the manufacturing company it is going to come equipped with four 240-pin DDR2 random access memory slots that should offer support for as much as 32GB of memory.
Thanks to the advanced AMD mainboard chipset, the ECS A770M-A is offering native support for random access memory modules running at clock frequencies between 400 and 800MHz, while coming with a variety of expansion slots. One PCI Express x16 slot is provided for housing a graphics card, while two PCI Express x1 slots are aimed at accommodating general expansion cards and this motherboard is also equipped with three legacy PCI slots.
On the storage side, the A770M-A is coming with two ports that support the legacy protocol Parallel ATA, while providing at the same time no less than four ports compliant with the Serial ATA II standard. An external Serial ATA connector is supported as well as the ECS product integrates the JMicron JMB361 chip that also allows users to create RAID arrays in various configurations.
The ECS A770M-A mainboard comes in a full ATX form factor and it also supports no less than six high speed USB 2.0 ports, as well as a fast Gigabit Ethernet connection, a 8 channel high definition audio processing unit, while offering extended overclocking support at the same time. As the AM2+ and AM2 processor sockets are compatible, this mainboard also supports the currently available AMD processing units while being intended to be used with the Phenom class of processors in order to get the best possible performance.