ASUS AM1I-A: A Mini-ITX Board For Socketed Kabini APUs

Linux Compatibility:

The AM1I-A is the main motherboard we have been using up to this point for all of our Athlon/Sempron AM1 benchmarking at Phoronix. The board has been working very well with modern Linux distributions; support for the AMD AM1 goes back to Ubuntu 13.10 but for the best support, especially on the Radeon R3 Graphics support, is found in the very latest distributions. The optimal Radeon R3 Linux support can be found with the Linux 3.14 kernel and Mesa 10.2.

The AM1I-A works great under Linux with the only major caveat to point out being the lack of any sensor support within Linux, aside from the built-in thermal support found within the Kabini APUs themselves. LM_Sensors in Ubuntu 14.04 didn't have any support for reading the fan speeds, temperatures, and other hardware sensors of this motherboard. However, this isn't needed by the vast majority of Linux users out there and it isn't uncommon for the Linux hardware motherboard sensor support to lag behind in their support.

We've already done a ton of benchmarking from the AM1I-A motherboard on Linux so checkout the other AM1 articles for performance details. This ASUS AM1 motherboard will also be used in at least two upcoming AM1 motherboard reviews from Gigabyte and ASRock.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with the ASUS AM1I-A motherboard for just $50 USD. My only gripes were wishing it didn't need an ATX power supply and the lack of a PCI Express x16 slot for those wishing to utilize discrete graphics. With it working well under Linux, the AM1I-A is worth considering if you'll be doing a low-cost socketed Kabini system build.