ASUS M5A99X EVO Motherboard Pictured – AMD 990X Chipset
Pictures of the ASUS M5A99X EVO motherboard have been revealed today and the board looks pretty awesome. This is one of the very first images that we have seen of the upcoming socket AM3+ platform by AMD. If it our understanding these boards have a beefed up power system to handle the extra juice that AMD’s FX-Series ‘Zambezi’ processors are going to demand. The ASUS M5A99X EVO uses the AMD 990X and SB950 chipsets and is said to be ready for AMD’s FX-Series “Zambezi” 8-core, 6-core, and 4-core processors. We have a feeling many more AMD 900 series motherboards will be coming out in the weeks to come as they will be on display at Computex from what we hear!
The AMD 990X is designed for discrete graphics with up to two graphics cards in CrossFireX. It is likely that the final iteration has NVIDIA SLI support out of the box. The AM3+ Black socket is powered by 8-phase Digi+ VRM, cooled by a large heatsink that sits next to the northbridge heatsink. ASUS came up with a new heatsink design theme. While the P8P67 series uses heatsinks with curvy/wavy fins, the M5A series uses sharp edges. The AMD 990X northbridge gives out 16 PCI-Express 2.1 lanes split between two x16 slots. When both slots are populated, the graphics cards run on x8 bandwidth. The third black x16 slot is wired to the SB950 southbridge, and is likely x4. Other slots include two PCI-Express x1 and a PCI. Storage connectivity includes six SATA 6 Gb/s ports from the SB950 southbridge that support RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, 10 modes; a third-party controller drives two additional SATA 6 Gb/s internal ports. We don’t know if there’s another such controller handling eSATA.
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