Biostar has announced three socket AM1 motherboards.
Biostar Reveals Lineup of Socket AM1 Motherboards : Read more
Biostar Reveals Lineup of Socket AM1 Motherboards : Read more
The 2 boards at the bottom aren't Micro-ATX. They are a variant of Mini-ITX called Mini-DTX.
Tell me something: if the PCI-e controller is now in the SoC, does that mean that if a future AM1 chip comes with enough PCI-e lanes to support a PCI-e x16 slot, then can an existing AM1 motherboard with a physical x16 slot will support a video card at "full" speed?I guess it would also depend on whether or not socket AM1 has enough pins to handle that too, right?
Just a heads-up guys, the PCIe x16 only runs at x4 speeds.. So no, it wont run at full potential of GPU's.. But it does mean that you can put in a GT210/220 if your APU cant run 1080p smoothly! I'm in progress of scratch building a HTPC for well under £150 with one of these being put in when they're released. Otherwise i'll be pushing £165 for a celeron/GT210 combo..Thank you, someone remembered this one. Mini-DTX, while not very popular (maybe because it was thought up by AMD?), is NOT really plain Mini-ITX...The 2 boards at the bottom aren't Micro-ATX. They are a variant of Mini-ITX called Mini-DTX.Hmm... The answer might be "yes" IF there are enough traces on the motherboard connecting the SoC/CPU/PCIe Controller (depending on how you want to call it) and the PCIe 16x slot.In practice, however, I assume most, if not all, manufacturers will prefer to simply NOT bother with extra traces, which would make the motherboard more expensive to create (both on R&D and actual manufacture, since tracing is rather time consuming, and more traces mean having to also add extra interference protection to the motherboard).Also, it would depend on the CPU's pinout: PCIe traces need to have somewhere to link to, and if there are not enough pins on the CPU, you might not be able to connect as many traces as you need. This is the reason pinouts on Intel CPUs have been grown quite a bit ever since the PCIe controller was moved to the CPU socket area (and also why there's a limit on the number of PCIe lanes available from the CPU). As far as I can tell, this CPU needs to have traces for PCIe, memory, power, and all sorts of I/O (USB, DVI/HDMI/VGA, SATA, audio, etc.), so my guess is there are not really that many free pins, if any, to add to either the memory or PCIe interfaces.Which would ultimately mean that, short of a socket change, this is probably as good as this CPU line will get in terms of external interfaces (memory and PCIe). I totally support a review on the AM1 line, though.CheersMiguelTell me something: if the PCI-e controller is now in the SoC, does that mean that if a future AM1 chip comes with enough PCI-e lanes to support a PCI-e x16 slot, then can an existing AM1 motherboard with a physical x16 slot will support a video card at "full" speed?I guess it would also depend on whether or not socket AM1 has enough pins to handle that too, right?