MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 (A85X) Motherboard Preview

It’s been quite quiet on the motherboard front lately with no releases from both Intel or AMD, though we’ve seen a few manufacturers aim on higher-end Z77 based boards from the likes of ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI. Also with Thunderbolt being released, we’ve noticed a few boards crop up from time to time, though the hardware to match the boards isn’t exactly available in full force.

For AMD it’s been even quieter with FM1 slowly trotting on by and AM3+ still appealing to a selection of consumers. Z77 in our opinion hit AMD hard and has seen a lot of faithful AMD users jump ship to the blue corner, but AMD are hoping to redeem this by releasing their next generator of APU based products, which is where we find ourselves today.

Today AMD have allowed us to lift the lid on their new FM2 socket motherboards which incorporate a couple of different chipsets and with an MSI board on our doorstep, we thought that it would only be right to take a look at that first.

We’ve taken a look at a couple of MSI boards in the past and have been impressed with their work and hope that they can follow this trend on with the FM2-A85XA-G65 featuring the A85 chipset.

As this is only a preview, we are bound by NDA to only show you what AMD approve and therefore will be showing you the board in full detail including style, design and features. Sadly, as much as we want to, we’d love to show you benchmarks and of course overclocking but that will have to wait for another day.

So until then, lets take a look at the board and package, but before that, we need to look at what comes included with this FM2 A85 motherboard from MSI.