AMD’s Llano is not a new product; it is one that has been out on the market for long enough that all of the major hype and press has already been written. We recently wrapped up our long term testing of an AMD A6-3650 combined with a Gigabyte A75 motherboard. We were rather impressed with the performance that we saw, even if the numbers did not match up to the overall feel. Now we are taking a look at the same CPU, but taking a step down the ladder to the A55 chipset. This time the victim is the A55M-DS2 motherboard. You are losing a few items with this shift like USB 3.0, SATA 3.0 and a PCIe slot, but we wonder if that will really impact performance. So let’s take a look at the design and the features that you can expect to get when you pick up one of these.
BIOS -BIOS is an acronym that stands for Basic Input/Output System. It is meant to control your product at a very low level. As of right now there are three regularly used BIOS formats (there are actually more than that but there are three common ones). These are the AMI (American Megatrends Incorporated), Award, and Phoenix. The Gigabyte A55M-DS2 falls back to the old style of BIOSes. Instead of the newer UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) you get the traditional blue and white “plain text” flavor of BIOS. It is still more than functional, but it does not have the same flare that the newer BIOSes do.As you can see the BIOS layout is pretty much what you would expect from a Gigabyte motherboard.There is not much new to talk about from this end, but we will cover some of the highlights. As usual the M.I.T. pages are well laid out and keep to the clean and simple.
The rest of the BIOS falls into familiar categories like the Advanced BIOS features, Integrated Peripherals, etc. There really is not much to talk about here.
Conclusion Part II have to say that at this stage of the review I am walking away with some mixed feelings. The feature set would seem to indicate that the Gigabyte A55M-DS2 is a board intended to be used in an “always-on” style DVR or HTPC system. However, the lack of a heat sink over the power regulation makes me concerned for the longevity of this board if you chose the wrong case. Other items that are missing (if this is indeed an HTPC board) are HDMI (or Display Port), and a better audio CODEC. We have to wonder just where A55M-DS2 really does fit into the market as right now our best guess is at the very entry level as a basic desktop system. We hope that the performance testing will shed some light on where the A55M-DS2 belongs, or at least where it is best suited. Discuss this in our Forum
