Motherboards based on Intel Z77 chip have been lately given much attention, to the detriment of products featuring AMD solutions. In fact, motherboards with AMD chips are in abundance in the market, providing a competitive conditions for the manufacturers and plentiful offers for potential consumers. Asus developed a lot of boards with Intel Z77 chip, but it also boasts the products, like Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0, based on AMD 990FX chip for AM3+ socket. This model is an apt sample of performance, resources and design.



Integration


Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 is developed in ATX form-factor and features 305x244 mm dimensions. The motherboard accommodates five sockets for the connection of fans and large heatsinks which manage heat quite efficiently; heatsinks located on the northbridge and CPU power converter are joined by a heat pipe. There is one peculiar feature pertained to the implemented heatsinks: each of them is notable by an individual fixture type. The reverse side of the …

Radiator Deepcool with a frightening name is big and heavy, takes three adjacent PCI-E slots, and is expensive, but the efficiency is worth of consideration. About a year ago, the company Deepcool Industries Co., Ltd. released a cooler for graphics cards with high-sounding name Dracula.



The model has proved very successful, it stood out with very high level of efficiency and, most importantly, it is compatible with many video cards. But during time after release of «Dracula» AMD and NVIDIA have released new video cards, with some of which the cooler is not compatible. In particular, the lower the location of the GPU chip Tahiti requires revision of the cooler and Deepcool was not losing time, releasing a second version of Dracula.


The cooler is packed in a small cardboard box in black with a minimum of information on all sides. In this way Deepcool tried to emphasize cooler belonging to the dark forces and involvement in all the famous vampire of the Romanian …

VIA Technologies Inc., a global manufacturer of power-efficient processor platforms, has recently announced the release of its peculiar motherboard, codenamed VAB-800. The major peculiarity of these motherboards is that they will be delivered in two variants: with chips of VIA personal production, WonderMedia (800 MHz), and with Freescale ARM Cortex-A8 1 GHz chips. The volume capacities of DDR3 memory in either variant will equal to 1 GB. VAB-800 is developed in piro-ITX form-factor but is also compatible with blocks of ATX form-factor.



Motherboard VAB-800 accommodates flash-memory of eMMC type with the integrated SATA 3 Gbit/sec sockets. The total volume capacity of flash-memory equals to 64 GB. This model can boast a large number of internal sockets, including a couple of RS-232, two LVDS (to enable the connection with the up-to-date monitors), SATA, JTAG, SDIO, RTC, and a slot for the activation of the external power supply.


The manufacturer has taken care of the …