Biostar has announced a deal with AMD to launch a new FM2+ motherboard featuring an exclusive chipset, the A70M, designed to offer competitive features to the A68H and A58 chipsets at a lower price.
Available exclusively on Biostar’s latest A70MGP motherboard, the A70M chipset packs in the most commonly-required features of its more expensive equivalents. Full support for quad- and dual-core FM2+ and FM2 processors, including both the AMD A-series and E2-series accelerated processing units (APUs) is featured as well as the Athlon II X4, along with support for 32GB of DDR3 memory across two DIMM sockets, four SATA 6Gb/s ports and two USB 3.0 ports at the rear. The board itself, meanwhile, uses a compact micro-ATX form factor.
Before getting too excited, be aware that the new chipset does come with a few corners cut. The internal headers are USB 2.0 only, while the board features neither a DVI nor an HDMI connector for on-chip graphics; instead, users are forced into using an analogue VGA connection or installing a dedicated graphics card on the board’s PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot. Interestingly, this slot is joined by both a PCI-E 2.0 x1 slot and a legacy 32-bit PCI slot – a commitment to older peripherals which is continued with an internal RS232 serial port header and externally-accessible PS/2 port above the rear USB 2.0 ports.
Pricing for the new board has yet to be confirmed, but it is expected to launch for less than its rival A68H chipset systems.
