Asus F2A55-M (A55) Motherboard Review

As we’ve been testing the new AMD FM2 boards and APUs over the past week, I honestly don’t know whether I’m coming or going, but this board managed to straighten a few things out for me nicely. The main one showing that you can get great results, without the need to spend mass amounts of money, and that’s down to both Asus and AMD by what they’ve developed with the board and processor.

The F2A55-M is a bit of a Marmite board when it comes to styling as it’s still growing on me, but the dark brown PCB would have been better being a solid black colour as we’re seeing a lot more from other brands, but generally on the higher-end so this must be based around the cost element.

Feature wise, some aspects are good while others are a bit dire to say the least. We see support for CrossFireX which is fantastic for those on a budget, or for those who are able to get a bundle deal of some sort from a retailer. The bad side of it comes down to the likes of SATA ports which we know is down to the A55 chipset, but surely it wouldn’t have been to hard to add a Marvell controller or similar and cut down the amount of ports, so that Asus had a Micro-ATX board that can rival the competition with higher-end features.

In terms of performance, the board showed some unexpected results, with it coming out on top across the majority of tests. The weirdest thing that we noticed was that once overclocked, performance seemed to have degraded slightly, but this could be a limiting factor of the A55 chipset.

While we speak about overclocking, we were pleasantly surprised with the 4.2GHz overclock this board gave us as we thought that the A55 chipset would restrict us a lot more. Though we know it can’t compete with the A85X platform, it did a pretty good job of coming close to it and it seems that Asus have a good little board here, especially when you look at the low price point of around £65.

If you’re looking for a simple solution for a HTPC or simple PC for your teenage child who needs it for studying, this board is perfectly aimed at that segment and it simply offers a no frills approach to building a system. Couple this factor with the onboard iGPU, and a few other components and you have a complete system for next to no money which is more than capable of doing the task you throw at it, and as you saw earlier; it can even outperform the competition.