Sapphire introduce A55 Pure Platinum FM1 board

Sapphire have been busy designing a new Pure Platinum motherboard for AMD’s A55 chipset. A55 is the chipset which lacks native USB 3.0 and SATA III support, arguably it is therefore the budget FM1 chipset. The Sapphire A55 Pure Platinum supports all FM1 socket APUs/CPUs currently on the market. There is a 6 phase VRM to power the FM1 socket along with support for four sets of DDR3 DIMM slots which support up to 4GB at 1600MHz each (but higher when overclocking the CPU).

There’s a single PCI-E 2.0 16X slot (which supports Hybrid CrossfireX with the APU graphics) along with a couple of PCI-E 1X slots and three legacy PCI slots. As mentioned earlier the A55 chipset provides only SATA II ports, you get six of those. RAID 0, 1 and 10 is supported but there is no eSata. Although the two rear USB 3.0 driven by an ASMedia ASM1061 chip provides a suitable alternative.

Other connectivity includes VGA, DVI, HDMI,USB 2.0, Realtek 7.1 audio and gigabit ethernet, and a PS/2 keyboard or mouse port. Sapphire has also included its dual BIOS, debug LEDs and motherboard power, reset clear-CMOS and memory free butt0ns.

Source: VR-Zone