According to the Tech Connect Magazine the budget conscious motherboard makers ECS are planning the launch of three new FM1 motherboards on the A55 chipset. The three boards launched are the ATX ECS A55F-A , the mATX HTPC orientated ECS A55F-M2 and the office aimed ECS A55F-M3 which is also mATX.
The boards all come with a fully sized PCI-E 16X slot should the user want to add a discrete GPU but for most users of these budget boards the integrated graphics on the AMD APUs should be more than adequate. Connectivity is not fantastic all three boards lack USB 3.0 and the mATX boards only support 2 DDR3 DIMM slots. Graphical connectivity is fullest on the ATX board, which has DVI, VGA and HDMI: you can see the full ATX board below:
ECS A55F-A
The other boards start to see features dropping off as they become cheaper, for example the M2 board loses a DVI slot and 2 DIMM slots whilst the M3 board loses the DVI and HDMI while only keeping the VGA input. All three boards come with PCI slots for users still running older expansion cards. With regards to capacitors and VRM don’t expect anything fantastic, these boards have been built from the ground up for providing functionality at a fantastic value price. No pricing yet but these boards are going to be very cheap, expect them to show up in 2 weeks or so.
ECS A55F-M2
ECS A55F-M3
"expect them to be very cheap…" they better be!