Review of GA-F2A85X-UP4 Socket FM2 board with AMD A10-5800K APU
Bluetooth 21 Oct 2012
A few weeks ago, AMD launches it’s newest A85X chipset and FM2 socket processors. The socket FM2 processors are improved versions of the FM1 processors, especially in the graphics and data encoding function but they do not share the same socket type.
The GA-F2A85X-UP4 is one of the new boards that Gigabyte release to support these new processors.
Featuring the AMD A85X chipset, it supports native USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps. The board itself supports 4 DIMM memory slots with a total of 64GB of memory. It supports up to an official DDR3-1866 but can be overclocked up to DDR3-2400+. It also supporst the AMD memory profile (AMP) standard.
As for graphics, the integrated graphics within the APU, in our A10-5800K is a Radeon 6770D class graphics running at 800MHz. The graphics output can be from the D-SUB, DVI-D (up to 2560×1600), HDMI (up to 1920×1200) or DisplayPort (up to 2560×1600). The board also support Virtu MVP to boost graphics performance with any NVIDIA or AMD card on board together with the APU integrated graphics.
Alternatively external graphics card can be used. It has 3 full length PCIe slots that operates in PCIe x16, PCIe x8 (dual cards) and another PCIe slot at PCIe x4. There are 3 PCIe x1 and 1 PCI slot. The graphics card can run in CrossFire configuration or AMD dual graphics (selected cards in tandem with the integrated graphics in APU).
There are plenty of USB and SATA ports on board. There are 4 USB 3.0/2.0 (2 at back panel and 2 others thru internal USB header). Another 10 USB 2.0/1.1 can be supported (2 ports on the back panel and 8 ports thru USB headers). In addition, Gigabyte supports another 2 more USB 3.0/2.0 ports with the Etron EJ168 chipset.
In terms of features, the specific ones for Gigabyte boards are quite standard. They are @BIOS, Q-Flash, EasyTune, DualBIOS, Auto green, On/Off charge, 3D UEFI BIOS, 3TB+ Unlock etc.
The GIGABYTE motherboard employ award winning GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ 5 technology that includes high current capable components for the CPU power zone including IR3550 PowIRstage® ICs from International Rectifier, 2X Copper PCB and high current Ferrite Core Chokes rated up to 60A, which together are able to deliver cooler temperatures than traditional motherboards. Featured on a range of new motherboards based the AMD A85X Chipset, GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ 5 technology is the next evolution in quality motherboard design.
In the next few pages, we will go through the details and benchmark it against the BIOSTAR FM2 board and compare it with A8-3850 (FM1) and Intel Core i5-3570K.