MSI's upcoming A75A-GD55 motherboard pictured

[siopao1984]

MSI's upcoming A75A-GD55 motherboard pictured by VR-Zone.com

So far MSI has only officially unveiled a pair of AMD A75 motherboards, the A75A-G35 and the A75MA-G55, but the company should have at least another four models coming. VR-Zone has managed to get hold of some exclusive pictures of the upcoming A75A-GD55 model which will be MSI's high-end A75 motherboard and possibly also the most expensive model in the line-up.



We don't quite understand what MSI has done here though, as the A75A-GD55 is very similar to the A75A-GD35, although the PCB is a lot wider while remaining nearly void of components past the memory slots. In fact, at first glance the only obvious difference between the two models is that the A75A-GD55 has gained two memory slots for a total of four. The power connector and Voltage regulation for the memory has been moved further out on the PCB alongside with a pin header and a fan header, but there's really nothing much else here and it seems like the extra PCB was simply added to allow for the screw holes.



MSI has changed the chokes for its SFC branded ones over the regular chokes found on the A75A-GD35 and there's a larger heatsink on the MOSFETs. The slot layout remains the same with a two x16 PCI Express slots of which the lower one has four lanes of bandwidth at its disposal, three x1 PCI Express slots and two PCI slots. The internal USB 3.0 pin-header is still in the same awkward position and MSI decided to keep the jumper blocks for switching between DVI and HDMI output, which is really disappointing and a feature we wouldn't expect to see on a board this far up in MSI's product range.



The rear I/O also remains unchanged with a pair of PS/2 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, 7.1-channel analogue audio jacks and a D-Sub, DVI and HDMI port. We can't but to feel that MSI could've done better, but at least the good news is that the price difference between the A75A-GD55 and the A75A-GD35 is very small as we found a couple of European online retailers listing the A75A-GD55 for around €80 (S$140) whereas the A75A-GD35 is listed for around €75 (S$131) and while the A75A-GD55 is a better choice in terms of future upgradeability of the memory, it has little else to offer to its advantage.

[Daniel515]

昨日ニュースを読んでいたときに、MSIのマザーボード設計に関する技術的な分析記事を見かけ て、A75A-GD55とGD35の違いがほとんどメモリスロット数の増加と基板サイズの調整程度に見えるという指摘が興 味深かったところで、ちょうどnews japanの情報も見ていて、こうしたハードウェア比較系の記事がニュースの中に自然に含まれているのが印象的だった 。その後さらに考えると、見た目上の変更が少なくても内部設計や拡張性のために重要な調整が行われているこ とが分かり、PCハードウェアは細かな設計変更が性能や互換性に大きく影響する分野だと改めて 感じた。