APU A-Series from AMD has already proved itself as a fair correlation of performance and consumer properties. This allows users to create budgetary home systems that can readily cope with all contemporary tasks, video games, simultaneously providing a considerable speed increase. MSI is one of the companies to develop a motherboard on the basis of this platform, ensuring in its FM2-A85XA-G65 rich functional and maximal performance. The developers have managed to design the board with a minimal amount of additional controllers, though expansion facilities are sure to satisfy the majority of potential customers.



Design and Layout


Motherboard MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 belongs to Military Class III line and is developed in ATX form-factor. Similar to other products of this line, this model is differentiated by a voluminous cooling system and a quite powerful VRM node. This board is destined for Socket FM2 logics and is ready to accommodate processors of A-Series and Athlon. It is based …

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 …

Patriot Memory, a leading American supplier of solid-state drives and memory modules, introduces a new external wireless HDD. Codenamed Gauntlet 320, the drive features 139x86x24 mm dimensions and offers 320 GB capacity. The possibility of connection to this HDD up to eight devices is supposed to be the basic privilege of this model. Besides, the data might be streamed to five devices simultaneously. This is an outstanding showing comparing to analogous solutions.



Gauntlet 320 is furnished with an onboard lithium-ion charger that is able to work in autonomous mode up to five and a half hours in succession. Network opportunities are introduced by an integrated Wi-Fi adapter of 802.11 b/g/n standard; this adapter is able to support WEP, WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK security systems. High data transfer speed is ensured by the implementation of two USB 3.0 ports which are backwards compatible with USB 2.0 interface. It provides for unimpeded music, video and image streaming facilities with …