First AMD Brazos 2.0 Motherboard Shown by Sapphire

The fight for the high sales/low price market segment has been won by AMD for the past year, and the company is getting ready to conquer even a higher percentage of the market.

AMD needs huge volumes and it’s likely that the company will have to face shortages this summer, as spreading Brazos 2.0 and Trinity over all the market segments AMD is currently successful in will be pretty difficult. The Texas-based fabless CPU designer positioned Brazos for low-power small systems, netbooks, low-cost notebooks and cheap PC systems. Llano was also targeted for the low and mid-end notebook and desktop lines. Now AMD adds Windows 8 tablets, hybrids, mid to high-end UltraThin notebooks, all-in-one systems, and so on. As the company’s products are quite successful in their respective markets, the company has to ensure very high volumes of chips ready to ship out to customers.

The first Brazos 2.0-based motherboard was reportedly spotted at this year’s Computex show and it is coming from Sapphire. The Pure Mini E2-1800 comes with two SO-DIMM slots for a maximum of 8GB DDR3-1333 memory and features both a mini-PCIe and a full PCIe x16 slot. The board is powered by AMD’s E2-1800 APU. The next generation of low-power APUs from AMD is still based on TSMC’s now very mature 40nm process. Improvements come in the form of an increased clock frequency and a heap of new features like USB 3.0, for example.

The E2-1800 MHz APU runs at a 1700 MHz frequency. It has two “Zacate” processing cores, each with 512 KB or Level 2 cache and integrates a very capable iGPU, called AMD Radeon HD 7340. The AMD Radeon HD 7340 iGPU has 80 shaders and runs at a default frequency of 523 MHz, but it can turbo up to 680 MHz when the 3D tasks thrown at it are very demanding, but the total TDP is just 18 watts. Sapphire’s Brazos 2.0 motherboard uses mostly solid capacitors and we applaud the manufacturer for building affordable motherboards with quality in mind.

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