MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 (A85X) Motherboard Review

Today sees the official launch for AMD’s new APU platform named Virgo. It doesn’t just include a whole stack of new APU processors, but also sees a release of some new motherboards, featuring the FM2 socket and of course a variety of new chipsets.

The flagship chipset for the FM2 platform is the A85X chip which is featured on the MSI motherboard we’re looking at today, which is conveniently called the FM2-A85XA-G65 so you’ll be sure to know what socket and chipset it is, just from the name. Being called the “G65” also means that it’s pretty high-end. Unless MSI release a Big Bang version, we can’t see anything topping this out of their own range.

For those frequent readers of eTeknix, you may have seen the preview we did on this board last week, which can be found here. We focussed on the board itself, getting into the aesthetics, design and functionality but even though we could have showed a few benchmarks, we decided to wait, and instead showed a few power consumption figures, purely so you could wet your lips until today; the full review.

As we’ve already gone over the board design and features, we’d normally leave it out, but as it’s a new board, we’ll include what we wrote before on the next few pages for you to take a look at. We will also do our normal look at how the board performs under our benchmark suite before getting into the highlight for us; overclocking.

As this is a new platform and a new type of processor from AMD, overclocking should be an interesting task for all involved, but before we get into that, lets take another look at the whole package on offer.