MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 (A85X) Motherboard Review

With a new board, new platform and new processors comes a lot of mixed feelings. I for one, am an enthusiast and would much rather benchmark something with unparalleled power and the ability to gain 50% overclocks but these are few and far between, especially for those on a budget. With this in mind, it makes it hard for me sometimes, when I take a look at a product aimed at the budget/mainstream markets, but I have to try and do it with a fresh mind, so here it goes.

The first thing I have to comment on is the styling behind the board. It’s definitely one of the better boards on the market, and it seems MSI have had some good advice in the styling department, especially after the bullets and Gatling gun designs we’ve seen in the past. The contrasted blue and black colour scheme really does give off a professional look and the shiny blue heatsink really does present the board nicely and give it that finishing touch.

Whenever I’ve had to look at a MSI board, it certainly hasn’t gone without its teething problems and this board was very much the same, but it generally ends up with the board surprising me once the initial problems are out of the way and this mainly comes down to the BIOS. When we see a launch product being released, you’ll generally see us (as reviewers) go through 3 or 4 different BIOS versions before we release the review. Luckily this time it was only one BIOS but I still can’t help but feel the BIOS isn’t as “mature” as other competitor products, even on the same platform.

With the BIOS issues, it seems this has possibly hindered performance as we saw across some of the benchmarks, with the lower spec A55 board from Asus giving it a run for its money. Some tests showed that the implementation of the A85X chipset from AMD really has made a difference, and we were quite surprised to see the amount of SATA ports, all supporting SATA III speeds and truthfully had to double check the manual, spec sheet and even with MSI, but it does seem that the chipset really can offer these features.

Keeping with performance, a big part of this is overclockability and the MSI board didn’t disappoint in this area. We saw some nice results being pushed to 4.4GHz with little voltage change to the maximum AMD rated number of 1.475V. We did (behind the scenes) manage to clock the APU to 4.6/4.7GHz with 100% stability, but this required voltages being pushed to around the 1.575/1.6V mark which in AMD’s opinion isn’t safe, though our temperatures under a Corsair H80 seemed to be at a tame level throughout stress testing.

The last thing to focus on here is of course price, and though the platform, processors and boards only released today, we had trouble finding anywhere in the world that had it even listed, let alone selling it. If we base it around similar boards from their competitors, we would hope to see the FM2-A85XA-G65 falling just below the £100 price point, but obviously without any concrete pricing structure from retailers, we can’t trust this 100%.

Overall, I can honestly say that this board has given me mixed feelings, as I simply love the design of it and the feature list is certainly plentiful with the amount of SATA III ports, and the performance we saw with the SATA III and USB 3.0 ports alone. I don’t feel that this board warrants a performance based award or anything focussed on overclocking, but sticking to the board overall, I do feel that it’s quite innovative, especially with the style factor, and therefore it does warrant receiving our Innovation Award.