The desktop variants of AMD’s new Trinity APUs must be drawing near, because motherboard vendors are rolling out Socket FM2 motherboards in droves. Asus is the latest one to do so, having unveiled no fewer than four fresh mobos ripe for the new APUs.
These new arrivals include, from least to most feature-packed, the F2A85-M LE, F2A85-M, F2A85-M Pro, and F2A85-V Pro. The flagship of the bunch—the F2A85-V Pro—has four DDR3 memory slots, three physical PCI Express x16 slots (which can be arranged in a x8/x8/x4 config), DisplayPort and HDMI outputs, ALC892 integrated audio, six USB 3.0 ports, eight Serial ATA 6Gbps ports (including one external port), and a plethora of miscellaneous bells and whistles.
Among those bells and whistles are Asus’ GPU Boost feature, which can purportedly “enhance integrated graphics up to 17%,” and BIOS Flashback, which allows users to flash the EFI firmware by plugging in a USB storage device and pushing a button on the board. Incidentally, Asus says BIOS Flashback works even if there’s no processor or RAM installed. That should come in handy if the stock EFI doesn’t support whatever RAM or CPU you bought. Considering these mobos are brand new, though, that probably won’t be a concern anytime soon.
The board also has a dedicated button to load up the EFI, and it comes with wireless multimedia streaming functionality dubbed Remote Go!
Other members of the F2A85 series bear the -M suffix. Following Asus terminology, that indicates microATX form factors. Asus still offers dual physical PCIe x16 slots, a full eight SATA 6Gbps ports (including an external one), and at least four USB 3.0 slots on all the micro models, however. You can check out the full announcement on Asus’ website for a detailed breakdown of features.
Asus hasn’t announced pricing yet. That said, I’d expect the desktop variants of Trinity to be as budget-friendly as Llano (a.k.a. A-series) APUs.