AMD Trinity Meets Lucid Virtu on Gigabyte’s New “UP Series”

Well-known mainboard manufacturer, Taiwanese company Gigabyte, lately known as the “Thinnest UltraBook” record holder, has just presented its first FM2 maindboard during Computex 2012. The new toy is called Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4 and comes with very interesting features.

The motherboard will support AMD’s new Trinity desktop CPUs that feature new and improved Piledriver x86 cores along with a newer iGPU using VLIW4 architecture. This mainboard is part of Gigabyte’s new “UP Series” and features a new VRM system that promises much lower component temperatures especially in weak ventilated environments. The new VRM build on IP licensed from International Rectifer and brings a current intensity of 60 Amps per phase.

Gigabyte’s GA-F2A85X-UP4 “Trinity” motherboard has a 6 + 2 phase VRM and the technology from International Rectifier promises a 33% lower surface temperature for the VRM components in badly ventilated environments. That’s a promised average surface temperature of only 60 degrees Celsius versus the 90 degrees temperature we’re seeing on current mainboards. All mainboards using this type of VRM will dave the “UP” moniker in their naming scheme.

The Gigabyte’s GA-F2A85X-UP4 “Trinity” motherboard comes with three PCI-Express x16 slots, but the last one at the bottom is only x4 electrically and that usually means that it is connected to the chipset. Gigabyte’s DualBIOS is of course present along with six USB 3.0 ports and eight SATA III connectors with RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 support. The official memory support is up to DDR3 2400 MHZ + . That means that higher frequencies are attainable through the use of overclocking. Of course Gigabyte’s 3D BIOS (UEFI) is present along with Ultra Durable 5 technology and Gigabyte’s on/Off Charge with 3x USB power. On an interesting note, it seems that Gigabyte has signed a deal with Lucid and now the Lucid Virtu software is bundled with Gigabyte’s new mainboards. We can’t wait to see what Lucid is able to do for Trinity setups.

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