ECS A85F2-A Golden Board (A85X) Motherboard Review

Next up we took the board out of its packaging and are immediately greeted with a very bold looking board. It’s developed on the ATX form factor and features a black PCB, black slots and connectors and golden accented heatsinks, rear I/O and components including fets and capacitors.

It’s not as over-the-top as the Z77H2-AX was and actually works quite well with the black design of the slots and PCB but overall could match up nicely with other components such as the Palit JetStream series of graphics cards which happen to have a golden-like colouring on the cooler.

Around the CPU socket we see a two-piece retention cooler bracket for easy mount and enough room around the socket for larger CPU coolers. A single fan header for your cooler is located at the top of the board with a single 8-pin CPU power connector towards the rear of the board.

Scattered around are plenty of gold components with a passive gold heatsink cooling solution covering over the majority of them.

The only other cooling on the board covers the A85X chipset down the opposite end of the board. Once again this is golden and is low profile with a slatted design for the best thermal dissipation. It also sits between the PCI-Express x16 lanes so it shouldn’t obstruct larger graphics cards.

Memory wise, we find the usual dual-channel setup with four DIMM slots supporting up to 64GB of DDR3 with speeds from 1333MHz all the way up to 2600MHz through overclocking. AMD Memory Profile (AMP) and Intel Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) are also supported on this board.

Close to the memory module slots we also find the usual 24-pin ATX power connector in its usual spot.

This board is definitely not lacking any expansion slots with three PCI-Express x1 slots, two PCI-Express x16 slots and 2 legacy PCI slots. The two x16 slots will operate at x8 speeds if both lanes are populated, whereas the top lane will run at full x16 bandwidth if the other PCI-Express x16 slot remains free.

Support for AMD CrossFire is supported through the two PCI-Express x16 lanes, and Dual graphics for pairing with the integrated APU graphics is also supported by this board.

Moving down from the expansion slots we see the usual connectors with your front panel audio, COM header, SPDIF, chassis speaker, two fan headers, a native USB 3.0 header, three USB 2.0 ports and the typical front panel headers for your switches, buttons and LEDs.

Also nearby is the CMOS battery and a clear CMOS jumper though a button is also present on the rear of the board.

In terms of storage, we have a total of seven SATA III 6Gb/s connectors, all thanks to the AMD A85X chipset and all ports support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 natively.

As we move around the board, we end up looking at the very golden rear I/O panel which includes a VGA connector, DVI, DisplayPort and HDMI outputs. Also situated here is a clear CMOS button allowing you to reset your BIOS without taking the side off of your chassis making it handy for keen enthusiasts and extreme overclockers who are constantly tweaking BIOS settings. There are two USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA port (AMD A85X), four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit LAN through use of the Realtek 811E Ethernet controller and finally optical out and five auxiliary jacks courtesy of the VIA VT 1819S 8-channel high-definition audio codec.