Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 (A85X) Motherboard Review

Another day, another motherboard on the FM2 platform and today sees the turn for Gigabyte with their top of the range F2A85X-UP4. This particular board is aimed at competing with the MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 that we looked at the other day by utilising the same A85X chipset and mass amounts of features, which we’ll delve into later on in the review.

The A85X chipset is aimed at the higher-end of the scale when it comes to FM2 and offers the likes of CrossFireX support, mass amounts of SATA III 6Gb/s ports and a few other unique features which we will touch on as we go through the next couple of pages.

For Gigabyte, it’s been an extremely successful year, outselling some of its biggest rivals on the Z77 based market, and they hope to repeat this process with FM2 and Trinity.

As this board is fresh with us, and we didn’t get a chance to preview it prior to the NDA, we can start things from the top by going over a few things first, before we delve straight into the performance side of things.

First up, we’ll take a look at the package on offer including any bundled accessories. Shortly after, we can take a full tour of the board including design, style, features and main specifications. Of course, once this is out of the way, we can then move on to checking out the stock performance of the board, as well as pushing it as far as it will go by overclocking, to see how things stack up against stock performance and two other FM2 based boards from competitor brands.