Gigabyte lit the social media fuse and showed off some of the first pictures of one of the A85X based motherboards.  A85X is the successor to the original FM1 A75 chipset, and it had a rather robust featureset for a "budget" oriented chipset.  The original A75 was paired with the Llano APU, otherwise known as the A8/A6/A4 APU from AMD.  The A85 is pin compatible with the A75, but it offers two more SATA 6 ports than the previous unit.  Both share 14 USB ports, four of which are USB 3.0

The board overall looks nice and robust.  The black PCB and accoutrements make it seem like it is a mean board.  There are 4 USB 3.0 ports on the back and a header for front panel USB 3.0.  All eight SATA 6 ports are used on the board, six + one on the board and one e-SATA.  We do not know all the details about the power delivery system, but it looks like it is using a variant of what we saw with the latest Z77 boards from Gigabyte.  Good stuff, Mainerd.

October certainly looks to be the month that Trinity arrives.  Everyone is very curious how it will perform against the latest Ivy Bridge processors from Intel.  While AMD still has a GPU advantage, it is slowly shrinking.  Now we wonder how well the CPU part will perform and how much power it will pull.  Stay tuned, gentle readers…