Conclusion
The Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4 has pretty good performance despite the lower default cpu clk. We like the performance of the board with Lucid Virtu MVP. The results were truly amazing especially in gaming benchmarks. In fact, based on the price of the processor and internal graphics, the price/performance far exceeds than those of Intel Z77/Core i5-3570K. When it comes to data crunching, the APU may not be a match for the Intel counterpart though. The surprise is the video transcoding test, jumping from around 600KB/s to 2MB/s in the SiSoft Sandra 2012 benchmark test.
Features wise, this has all the bells and whistles you see on the Intel high end counterparts. You cget the Digital Power for auto voltage compensation,IOR Powlstage IR3550 industry leading 60A power rated power stage. 3D UEFI BIOS, dual bios, easytune etc. It also added in 2 more USB 3.0 ports supported by the Etron chipset.
Installation is pretty straightforward. The early BIOS did have some strange issues detecting the RAM modules but were resolved with BIOS F3E. We used our Kingston DDR3-2400 modules and were able to select up to DDR3-2133 using XMP profiles. A point to note is that when you install Windows 7 from USB stick, it is important to plug it into right USB 2.0 port. You might end up having no USB keyboard or mouse to continue the installation. The best is still to install it off the DVD ROM drive. The board supports XMP profile in addition to AMP profiles. I am not used to having the power, clear cmos button on the right hand corner of the board while the debug led remains on the left. There is also no clear cmos button at the back panel of the board.
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. In our test shown on the previous page, we managed to do a 4.5GHz. 4.4GHz remains the sweet spot for air cooling though.
Packaging is the usual SATA cables, manuals. This is rather disappointing as there are many USB 2.0/3.0 ports supported but not a single extension bracket is provided in the package.
In Conclusion, I feel that the AMD solution poses a viabale alternative to the more expensive Intel platform. Ask yourself, how often do you do video compression end encoding using the onboard graphics on the Core i5-3570K ? Do you play games very often ? If yes, the performance difference pairing it up with a high end card might have to be taken into consideration as AMD FM2 supports only PCIe 2.0.
In terms of cost/performance, AMD sets the benchmark for it. The Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4 is a board to consider. It may not be the cheapest you can find but it is not that expensive too. Price sho
In Conclusion, I give the Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4 our Gold Award.
Price ~ USD 125.
Pros
Good Price/Performance ratio
Installation software
Extra USB 3.0 ports by Etron
Cons
USB stick installation issues
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 | 8 / 10 |
| Overall Rating : | 9 / 10 |