With little fanfare, AMD has announced the availability of a 760G chipset designed for low-cost value systems for home and business users.
The chipset offers what AMD calls a balanced platform' and is intended to be energy efficient. It features integrated graphics running at 350MHz with DirectX 10 standard that it claims better rival Intel's G41 chipset for performance. The socket is AMD2 compatible, taking in most of AMD's current line of processors.
The chipset can be paired with discrete graphics cards to enable CrossFire, where multiple cards are used to increase graphics performance, particularly for gaming. However, it can also enable the use of multiple displays, helping to increase productivity for business users.
More specifically for business users, AMD points to options built into Adobe applications and Microsoft office to make use of DirectX9 and DirectX 10 hardware, making for a smoother experience in those applications.
The chipset also offers hardware acceleration of DVDs, reducing the CPU load on the system enabling other tasks to be continued in the background which viewing DVD content.
Meanwhile, the presence of RAID support is unusual for a chipset at this price, as is PCI Express Gen 2 support for compatibility with the latest add in cards.
AMD said the chipset will be available from a number of partners such as Asus, MSI, Foxconn and Gigabyte and is expected to cost in the region of $80 (55).
