Dannie: MBX-series Motherboards

Main articles: Motherboards (global market)

2022: MBX-Z60A

On May 12, 2022, it became known that the company, Dannie a developer and manufacturer, electronic engineers had created a motherboard MBX-Z60A focused on. This was the Chinese processors Zhaoxin written by the profile resource TechArtica, a subsidiary portal of the online publication The Wire.

Dannie created a motherboard based on Chinese Zhaoxin chips. Photo: hp.com.

As reported, the Dannie prepared motherboard MBX-Z60A made in the micro-ATX form factor. This means it will fit in a modern case, even a compact one. The board comes with a built-in Zhaoxin KX-U6780A processor, but without a separately soldered chipset on it. All the necessary controllers are sewn directly into the CPU itself.

Due to the micro-ATX form factor, the MBX-Z60A board does not have much space for additional connectors. So, for RAM, only two slots are allocated here. DDR4-2133/2400/3200 bars are supported, but the manufacturer does not disclose their maximum volume.

There are two PCIe x16 slots for installing discrete graphics cards, and for a modern SSD there is only one M.2 slot. supported dimensions are 2242, 2260 and 2280. The second connector is M.2 designed to install an optional board with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi modules.

Four SATA III devices can be connected to the MBX-Z60A, be they drives or optical drives. The list of interfaces includes six USB 3.0, VGA, HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs. There is a pair of Ethernet and two PS/2 connectors for connoisseurs of ancient keyboards and mice. All of the above fit on textolite with dimensions of 225x205 mm.

Zhaoxin KX-U6780A is an eight-core CPU manufactured according to relatively modern 16-nanometer standards. Its frequency reaches 2.7 GHz, and inside it are controllers for 16 PCI Express 3.0 lines, as well as USB and SATA interfaces.

The processor does not have an L3 cache, but there is an L2 cache - 4 MB each in two clusters. Multithreading is also not provided in this chip.

According to TechArtica, in the Geekbench 5 benchmark, the Zhaoxin KX-U6780A processor demonstrates far from the most outstanding results. In single-core mode, it received only 355 points, and in multi-core mode - 2187 points. By modern standards, this is extremely small, even in comparison with processors for smartphones. It makes no sense to compare it with modern desktop CPUs, since the next generation Intel Core i3-12100 budget Alder Lake gives 1745 and 6525 points, respectively.

According to these indicators, the product of the Chinese Zhaoxin barely catches up with the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 processor, which received the same 355 points in single-core mode. But this processor was released in the second quarter of distant 2009 and was produced in a 45-nanometer topology. According to the indicators of the multi-core mode, Zhaoxin KX-U6780A is at the level of the 32nm Intel Core i5-2500 sample of the 1st quarter of 2011^[1].

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