Conclusion
The BIOSTAR Hi-Fi A85X has pretty good performance in general, thanks to the A10-5800K which is paired up with the board. In our comparison tests, we tested it against the Intel platform which is almost doubled in pricing. There is no doubt the internal graphics performance exceeds our expectations. When we paired it up with an external graphics card, the PCIe 2.0 could be the bottleneck that reduced the overall score. When it comes to rendering and video encoding, the board and processor did better than the FM1. In fact, we were surprised by the jump in Video transcoding test, jumping from around 600KB/s to 2MB/s.
Features wise, this board is not another FM2 board. Hi-Fi enthusiast will be pleased with the dedicated components used on board for this board to ensure minimum noise. Other features include the Multi channel Calibration tool for audio performance. The board also comes with Virtu MVP and SmartSpeedLan which monitors and manages your PC network behaviour.
Installation is pretty straightforward and the BIOS is very complete with large voltage ranges for you to choose from. TOverclocker, the overclocking tool also comes handy whenever you want to overclock the board from within Windows. The only regret was that the first BIOS was a bit fleaky with DDR3-2400 modules. The second revision is capable of reading XMP modules settings which makes it easy to setup for end users.
Overclocking wise, how well it can overclock really depends on the processor. For the A10-5800K, the best spot should be around 4.4GHz (from 3.8GHz). GPU clock should range from 800Mhz to around 1.2GHz. The voltages must be raised accordingly to get it stable.
Packaging is the usual SATA cables, manuals. Perhaps BIOSTAR can consider bundling some benchmark tools or games in the future. The software installation screen has room for improvement.
Talking about cost/performance, AMD sets the benchmark for it. If you are a user who just needs a PC for basic gaming, the on board graphics should suffice unless you require lots of power to do data crunching or analysis. In fact, the BIOSTAR Hi-Fi A85X and the AMD A10-8500K has given us a viable alternative solution to the expensive boards and processors.
In Conclusion, I give BIOSTAR Hi-Fi A85X our Gold Award largely due to it’s price/performance ratio and impressive on board graphics.
Price ~ USD 103.
Pros
Lucid Virtu
Dedicated Hi-Fi components
Good Price/Performance ratio
Cons
Early BIOS has ram compatibility issue
The buttons are a bit rigid
Should includeClear CMOS button at the backplane
| Category | Score |
| Performance | 9 / 10 |
| Features | 9 / 10 |
| Ease Of Installation | 9 / 10 |
| Overclocking Features | 9 / 10 |
| Documentation | 9 / 10 |
| Packaging | 10 / 10 |
| Cost / Performance | 10 / 10 |
| Overall Rating : | 9.3 / 10 |
AMDroid, u r right about the board, I thought i would also get a review on the Audio system,
And the review didn’t touch on the Audio aspect??? That is one of the strengths of this board! The comparo is also invalid, it should be tested with Intel i3s and similar lower-end CPUs, not the more expensive i5s. Of course the more expensive platform would win, and those synthetic benchmarks mean nothing because most of them don’t reflect real-world performance in games and multi-threaded, highly optimized programs. Plus a lot of them are Intel-optimized since they mostly use Intel-compilers which naturally would benefit Intel CPUs more.
I would like a more comprehensive review of the Audio system on this board since it is one of only two FM2 boards that use the high-end Realtek ALC898 audio chip (the other being the AsRock FM2A85X Extreme 6), most of the other boards use the low-end ALC892 or 888 audio chip. The ALC898 on this board has superior SNR for both output & inputs (109+ dB) and it should be evident in use.
Definitively a nice looking mainboard, the CPU Vcore regulator looks sturdy and all in all it made a good impression to me 🙂
And for relatively cheap price it offer competitive speed to Intel competitor at premium price. Socket FM2 show a good start!
awesome!
hope AMD did a good job so Intel will lower their CPU price.