Detail Pictures of the motherboard
The motherboard uses a brown PCB with blue chipset heatsink and capacitors. It has 3 full length PCIe 2.0 slots which can be used for multi card CrossFireX. There is a single PCI slot and 3 PCIe 2.0×1 on board.
The top left corner of the motherboard is where the audio amps and resistors are found. In fact from the flip side, we can see the dedicated circuitry being used to ensure low noise. To the right are the various connectors on the backplane. The power connector, the mosfets etc. Below it is the Socket FM2 socket processor. Socket FM2 and FM1 are incompatible with each other.
Below it is the 4 DIMM slots that can work in DDR3-2400 (OC) in dual memory channel architeture. To it’s left is the heatsink attached to the A85 chipset.
The A85 chipset supports native SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0. So there are no additional chipset on board.
To the left is the power switch, reset switch, clear cmos switch and the auto oc. If the auto oc switch is pressed, it will run the CPU on higher speeds based on tested results. Of course, if you wish, you can use Toverclocker or the UEFI BIOS to fnie tune your APU.
The backplane consists of PS/2 keyboard, 2 USB, 1 HDMI, 1 Display port, 1 D-SUB, 1 DVI-D, 2 USB 3.0, 1 eSATA 6Gbps, 2 USB 2.0, GbE and 8 ch audio ports.
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.