AMD APU conFUSION

[Jester69]

Hello All,

I hope all is well with everyone. The question I got is regards to AMD APU's. I am planning on creating a SFF desktop using the zacate apu whenever that is released so I would be looking for an ITX sized motherboard. Now I saw some pics of the ITX motherboards already including the APU. Now this is where I get confused, the mboard had a pci-express 2.0 which I would assume be for a graphics card (or maybe hardware raid controller
but I dont see why I would put one on an ITX board). The APU already has a graphics processor so would putting an amd graphics board increase overall graphics processing power (the APU and GPU from the grahics board work together...a but like hybrid crossfire) or would putting an amd graphics board be a waste since the APU wouldn't work with the GPU? Oh the graphics board I would be putting wouldnt be powerful at all. Just enough to watch full HD content and maybe play some stategy games like starcraft II or something like that.

Thanks for the replies and insight.

 

[MU_Engineer]

Hello All,

I hope all is well with everyone. The question I got is regards to AMD APU's. I am planning on creating a SFF desktop using the zacate apu whenever that is released so I would be looking for an ITX sized motherboard. Now I saw some pics of the ITX motherboards already including the APU. Now this is where I get confused, the mboard had a pci-express 2.0 which I would assume be for a graphics card (or maybe hardware raid controller
but I dont see why I would put one on an ITX board). The APU already has a graphics processor so would putting an amd graphics board increase overall graphics processing power (the APU and GPU from the grahics board work together...a but like hybrid crossfire) or would putting an amd graphics board be a waste since the APU wouldn't work with the GPU? Oh the graphics board I would be putting wouldnt be powerful at all. Just enough to watch full HD content and maybe play some stategy games like starcraft II or something like that.

Thanks for the replies and insight.

There are already Zacate boards out. The PCIe x16 slot can fit whatever you want to put in it, but I would not put a GPU in that slot unless it's because the motherboard doesn't have the video outputs you want. The Fusion APU is about as powerful of a GPU as the Bobcat-based CPU can handle, according to recent tests, so there's no point in trying to put a more powerful discrete GPU in that board. Putting a disk controller in the PCIe x16 slot would make for a pretty nice file server, though.