Introduction

Just over a week ago we looked at our first Llano motherboard which came from GIGABYTE in the form of the A75-UD4H. It looked good, but until we're able to throw our AMD APU into it, we won't know the full potential of both the board and the platform. While we're still a few days away from the NDA lifting on the APU itself, ASUS has lifted the NDA on their motherboard today which gives us the opportunity to give you a preview of what exactly they're offering.

Because we're doing a preview, the main focus is of course the board itself. This means we'll start by looking at the package to see what ASUS are including in the bundle. Once we've done that we'll move onto the board itself to have a look at what kind of expansion slots they're offering and what's happening on the I/O side of things.

Once we've done that, we would normally just have a bit of a look at some of the specific features that ASUS are offering, but because our AMD APU has arrived, we thought we'd fire up the board and check out the BIOS to see what's going on. Of course, we'll be blanking out any information that's related to the CPU model / speed, but we'll at least in the meantime be able to get a good idea of what's happening in the BIOS.

Once we've looked at the BIOS, then we'll check out some of the specific features that ASUS are going to be promoting before we wrap everything up in our final thoughts. As mentioned, though, let's first get into the box / package and see what ASUS are going to be offering us come launch day of the new AMD Llano platform.

The Package

Looking at the board box, it follows the overall design over other "Pro" series boards we've seen from ASUS. The front gives us the model and a rundown of some of the main features the board offers, while turning over we get a picture of the board and some more detailed information on some of those features that ASUS mentioned on the front of the box.

As we move inside, we're not greeted by a huge package, and considering the target audience for the Llano platform (Mainstream), it comes as no surprise. We've got a manual and driver CD along with our ASUS quick connectors, two SATA cables and our standard I/O shield.