ASUS AM1I-A: A Mini-ITX Board For Socketed Kabini APUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ASUS AM1I-A: A Mini-ITX Board For Socketed Kabini APUs

For those looking at purchasing hardware for a low-cost socketed Kabini APU system build following our many AMD AM1 Platform tests under Linux that found the low-end hardware to play well with the open-source operating system, one of the motherboards worth considering is the ASUS AM1I-A.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=20208

[Nobu]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was limited by things other than the PCIe bandwidth before it reached x16 speeds anyway, but if you really wanted to there's nothing preventing you from modifying it to accept x16 cards (except, maybe the warranty); there's plenty of room.

It looks like AMD has strayed from their standard AM2/3 heatsink mount for this one. Is that part of the specification for this socket, or just to save space on this board because a larger heatsink is probably unnecessary?

[riklaunim]

Intel J1800/J1900 boards have only PCIe 1x max too. Zotac makes one PCIe 1x nVidia card but it rather won't add much over HD4000.

[Adarion]

Hmm, 2 SATA... well, a bit more would make a nice fileserver.
Backpanel has nice buch of connectors, older and newer. Realtekchips = good, cause the normally just work.
4xPCIe well... what would you do with a full featured x16 dGPU in this tiny machine? Would that make sense at all? I actually miss a PCI more since I still got lots of PCI cards.
Any info on (more) serial and parallel headers or anything? SuperIO (it's not just the sensors and serial!)? Flashrom/Coreboot compatibility? USB_3_ pin headers?
Do they still have this ... uh, Z-flash or Q-flash or whatever Asus called it? So could one do BIOS (mkay, UEFI) updates without Windows? How is ACPI implementation?

[curaga]

It looks like AMD has strayed from their standard AM2/3 heatsink mount for this one. Is that part of the specification for this socket, or just to save space on this board because a larger heatsink is probably unnecessary?

AM1 has a new cooler spec. Though some mobos also support older coolers.

[Gusar]

Looking at the pictures of the board, the PCIe slot is open-ended. Which means you can very well plug in a regular graphic card intended for 16x slots and it'll work fine. Slower of course than on a real 16x slot, but that's no different on the Asrock board that will be reviewed next, which has a physical 16x slot that is only 4x electrically (unless there exist Asrock AM1 boards other than the ones I've seen so far).

[AJSB]

To Michael and everybody else:

This ASUS MoBo indeed have a PCIeX4 connector , HOWEVER, THIS IS NOT A NEGATIVE POINT AT ALL:

1. ALL AM1 MoBoS, no matter have a PCIeX16 or PCIeX4 connector, have those connectors wired in X4 form (4 lanes).

2. This ASUS MoBo have a PCIeX4 connector that is open ended, this means that it can accept ANY PCIeX16 video card.

3. This might be a surprise to many of you but the performance difference between X16 and X8 is very small and even from X16 to X4 isn?t that big even in powerful CPUs (i have a link somewhere where, IIRC, TomsHardware or someone else that prooves it)...in fact, other limitations in Kabini will kick in before the real limitiations of X4 kicks in.

4. So, those results in Window$ that i showed links in other threads of Athlon 5350 paired with GTX750Ti were with video card working in 4 lane mode witch makes those results even more amazing.



I?m still waiting for Michael publish results of 5350 paired with GTX750 and GTX750Ti using Nvidia blob in LINUX

[AJSB]

This is NOT the test about what i was talking, this doesn?t include 4 lanes, but still it?s a nice one:

http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/art...rformance-518/


Surprise, Surprise

I have somewhere that test with 4 lanes, i gonna try find link (witch will be like find a grain of sand in a beach with my (lack of) organization )

[AJSB]

Here it is:

From PCIe 1.1 to 3.0 and from 4 lane to 16 lane:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/I...caling/23.html

Have a nice reading

[mendieta]

fascinating

This is fascinating. You can build a pretty decent, low power desktop system for ... how much? Anyone ran the numbers? I am thinking, these APU's cost you about 50 USD, another 50 for the mobo, perhaps 50 for 8gb RAM and another 50 for a 50Gb SSD? If you can get a case with PSU for extra 50, you have a solid desktop for $250. Not bad! (not having first class open source support would still prevent me from going back to AMD, but I know this has been improving significantly)