Asus F2A85-V Pro (A85X) Motherboard Review

Overall, we knew straight away that this board was going to be a strong contender, and not just in one area but in pretty much every aspect and that’s what we’ve come to know and love from Asus. It’s always nice when a new platform is invented and we get to see what features are going to be added and with the F2A85-V Pro we find that nothing has been missed out with TPU, EPU, DirectKey, Qslot, and much more and these are all tried and tested features that we know first hand can make a different in terms of performance, quality and longevity of a product.

The styling behind the board is a step up from previous boards and we can only assume that the next boards after this will offer something even better looking as that’s what we’ve found Asus have been doing over the years, trying to keep with the times and it works, so we can’t fault them on that. Feature wise, we see the A85X chipset really been harnessed and some other added extras coming along, such as the extra two USB 3.0 ports thanks to ASMedia and this is what a user expects on a higher-end board like this.

The area that we were most pleased with had to be performance, as this board pretty much outperformed the others in every test and while it requires a bit more juice to run on, it’s not the amount of power draw that will cost you fortunes in your electricity bills. While the performance was good, the overclocking side of things was just below what we were expecting, and this did lose out to some of the other boards which managed to clock to around 100MHz faster in previous reviews, but on the same hand, the performance at 4.5GHz on this board still manages to rival that of the competition running at 4.6GHz which is great for Asus as it shows that their technology and BIOS manages to really squeeze every drop of performance out of the APU, no matter what speed it’s at.

Looking at the price of the board, it can be had for anyone from £100 – £125 depending on your retailer preference, which actually comes in cheaper than a few of the higher-end A85X based boards from competitors, yet this still manages to outperform them making this a real no-brainer.

The FM2 platform and the newest APU architecture from AMD have really excelled with this board and we’d have no gripe recommending it to anyone. For anyone who has used Asus boards before, they will find this board fulfilling their needs to every last detail and for those who haven’t used an Asus board yet, this is a nice step onto the ladder and with an attractive price point, it really is for the FM2 range, an extreme performer.