AMD announces 785G motherboard chipset

Posted on 4 Aug 2009 at 14:42

AMD's newest motherboard chipset was announced this morning, adding AM3 support and a graphics upgrade to the reliable 780G chipset, which currently forms the basis of many low-cost AM2+ motherboards.

The new Northbridge isn't designed to provide a massive performance boost to gamers and other power-users ??" that's what the 790 series is for. However, the 785G raises the bar for mid-range motherboards and PCs.

It supports the HyperTransport 3.1 standard, which will be used in future AM3 processors, as well as the HT 3.0 used by all current AM2+ and AM3 processors. It can also support faster DDR3 memory, as well as DDR2. What this means is that you should soon be able to buy a motherboard with full AM3 and DDR3 support for rather less than the relatively pricy 790 boards you'll need at the moment.

The 785G will have the most sophisticated onboard graphics processor we've yet seen from AMD: the Radeon HD 4200. It has full support for DirectX 10.1 but it's still not up to 3D gaming. Home cinema buffs will appreciate the addition of ATI's Unified Video Decoder 2.0 (UDV 2.0) for full hardware decoding of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1. It can even handle decoding two simultaneous streams and supports HDMI 1.3 with full eight-channel LPCM audio over HDMI. Other supported outputs are DVI, Display Port and D-Sub.

The 785G Northbridge will appear on boards alongside AMD's SB710 Southbridge which, like the SB700 we're used to seeing paired with the 780G chipset, supports up to six SATA II hard disks with support for RAID 0, 1 and 10 storage arrays. It can also be paired with the SB750 Southbridge, which supports RAID 5.

Author: Kat Orphanides

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