Asus F2A85-V Pro (A85X) Motherboard Review
Andy Ruffell / 12 years ago
Looking at the board, it has to be said that with every new board, Asus up their game more and more, and for a non-enthusaist (ROG) based board, we have some pretty good styling going on with a nice blue and black colour scheme which works really well. The board features an ATX form factor and we can see a nice amount of features from a first glance.
Taking a closer look at the boards features, around the CPU socket we find some quite small passive cooling solutions around the VRMs. One of them links through to a heatpipe and follows down the board to the chipset heatsink. There are also two fan headers near the top of the board, and a third just to the left. Nearby we also have a single 8-pin CPU power connector to deliver clean power to the CPU and memory for overclocking.
The other heatsink on the board is a low-profile solution with Asus Dual Intelligent Processors III branding on it and some funky blue colouring. Underneath, is the A85X chipset which controls the bulk of the features on the board including SATA and USB.
In its usual location the board comes equipped with four DIMM slots running in a dual-channel configuration supporting up to 64GB of DDR3 of speeds ranging from 1066MHz up to 2400MHz (OC) and supports AMD Memory Profile (AMP) certified memory modules.
Also closeby is a MemOK! button, ATX 24-pin power source, a native USB 3.0 header and EPU switch.
Moving over to the expansion slots, you can straight away see quite a variety with two PCI-Express x1 slots, three PCI-Express x16 slots (x16/x8/x4) and two legacy PCI slots. AMD CrossFireX is also supported in a 3-way configuration and LucidLogix MVP technology is also supported by this board.
Further down slightly is our front panel connectors and headers which include audio, a fan header, COM port, plenty of USB and the typical chassis headers for buttons and LEDs. Also down here is a TPU switch, BIOS switch and DirectKey button.
On the edge of the board, we find a total of 7 SATA ports all utilising SATA III 6Gb/s functionality through use of the AMD A85X FCH (Hudson D4) chipset. All ports support RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD.
Finally, we finish around the back of the board at the rear I/O and find a total of two USB 2.0 ports, a PS2 mouse/keyboard combo port and optical SPDIF. For those utilising the APUs video functions, we have HDMI, DisplayPort, VGA and DVI. Also present is an eSATA 6Gb/s port, four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit LAN and 6 auxiliary ports.
The Gigabit LAN is provided thanks to the Realtek 8111F controller, whereas two of the USB 3.0 ports are controlled by ASMedia and the other two by the A85X chipset and the audio ports use the Realtek ALC892 8-channel high definition audio codec and are jack sensing ports.
