World’s first AMD FM2+ ASUS motherboards in SA?

ASUS has revealed their plans to launch the world’s first socket FM2+ motherboards for AMD’s Trinity, Richland, and upcoming Kaveri processors.

The company has planned the launch of the A88XM-A and the A55BM-A/USB3, two mATX motherboards that should take the fight straight to motherboards sporting Intel’s H81 and H87 chipsets.

ASUS South Africa has confirmed to MyGaming that there isn’t yet a big enough need for importing these motherboards into South Africa. As such, they will only be available in the US and Canada, and most of Europe including the United Kingdom.

A55BM-A

The A55BM-A is the cheaper of the two and is a nice compact design. It has two DDR3 slots supporting up to 32GB of DDR3-2133 memory, one PCI-Express 3.0 slot, six SATA 3GB/s ports, two USB 3.0 ports at the rear along with VGA, DVI-D and HDMI-out. It only has a four-phase VRM bank and won’t overclock too high, but will allow for some tweaking of the processor’s clock speed and memory speeds.

A88XM-A

The slightly more expensive but very similar-looking A88XM-A is a bit wider to allow for space for another two memory slots and six SATA 6GB/s ports. It also has PCI-Express 3.0 and tacks on two front-panel USB 3.0 ports, an extra VRM phase and AMD’s A88 chipset, which allows for more tweaking and overclocking and additionally opens up support for 64GB of DDR3-2133 RAM.

ASUS A55BM-A USB3

ASUS A88XM-A

Kaveri coming in 2013

While these two motherboards are going to be available very soon and currently support AMD’s Trinity and Richland processors, the name on enthusiasts’s minds is Kaveri. Kaveri is the next generation of APUs, manufacturer on the 28nm process and comprised of up to two Steamroller modules and up to 384 Graphics Core Next (GCN) shader cores, bringing up the graphics component in line with the current Radeon HD7000 family.

AMD’s 2013 updated APU roadmap

Kaveri will not only be more powerful than Richland, it will also be the first APU to integrate with AMD’s HD7000 graphics cards. Already AMD is readying the Radeon HD7730 with several vendors and it has specs that very closely match that of the integrated graphics in Kaveri.