ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 (A85X) Motherboard Review

Unboxing the board from its packaging, we take a first look at the FM2A85X Extreme 6 in all its glory. The board uses the ATX form factor and comes styled on a dark brown PCB with black slots and of course the high-quality looking gold capacitors scattered across the board.

We’re big fans of this design on this board as we’ve made it clear on other previous similarly styled boards and am glad that ASRock have stuck with this design as it’s definitely a step up from their older designs. The gold capacitors against the black accented slots really does strike a nice contrast and sits well on the brown PCB.

Moving in towards the new FM2 socket, we see an open bracket design for easy installation of your CPU cooler with plenty of room around it. There is a small, slim passive heatsink with the “Extreme” branding upon it which helps keep the vital socket components nice and cool.

Other things worth noticing is the single 8-pin CPU power connector at the top and the 4-pin Molex connector for those wanting to take advantage of multiple graphics card solutions. Also we see three fan headers at the top of the board and a further two towards where the Molex connector is located.

The board features one more heatsink towards the bottom right corner, which once again is a passive solution. It’s a low-profile design and includes ASRock branding and a slight splash of colour to brighten things up a bit. Being low-profile allows longer graphics cards to be used without obstruction. Under this passive cooling solution is the AMD A85X chipset which is at the heart of this board and is the newest chipset from AMD.

Just next to the chipset cooler are the four dual-channel memory slots supporting up to a whopping 64GB of DDR3 with speeds from 1066MHz to 2600+ through overclocking and also support both AMD Memory Profile (AMP) and Intel Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) memory modules.

Also nearby is the ATX 24-pin power connector and native USB 3.0 header.

Taking a look in the opposite corner, we see a huge array of expansion slots including two PCI-Express x1 slots, three PCI-Express x16 slots of which the first operates at x16, the second at x8 and the third at x4 speeds and depending on how you utilise the expansion slots will depend on what speeds the slots operate at. Also on the board are two legacy PCI slots. The board supports AMD CrossFire and includes VirtuMVP/Dual Graphics if wanting to pair up your discrete graphics card with the integrated graphics of the APU.

The CMOS battery is also located between the PCI-Express slots.

At the bottom of the board we find our usual suspects of headers and connectors with front panel audio, SPDIF, COM port, CIR header, two USB 2.0 ports, IR header, system fan header and front panel connectors including power LED and chassis intrusion header.

Also in the bottom corner, you’ll find a power and reset button as well as a debug LED for troubleshooting POST issues.

Storage wise, we have a total of seven SATA ports all featuring SATA III 6Gb/s speeds and supports RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 and run its functionality through the new AMD A85X chipset.

Finally moving around to the rear of the board we find a variety of connectors on the rear I/O. From left to right we see a PS2 mouse/keyboard combo port, VGA connector, DVI, DisplayPort and HDMI display connector. A clear CMOS button is also present, next to two USB 2.0 ports, eSATA and two USB 3.0 ports as well as a Gigabit LAN port (Realtek RTL811E controller), SPDIF and five auxiliary ports making use of 7.1 channel audio thanks for the Realtek ALC898 audio codec.