ECS A85F2-A Golden Board (A85X) Motherboard Review

Early this year, ECS decided to spice things up a bit by adding some bling to their products and ended up coming out with a complete new line up branded as the “Golden” series. ECS claim that the Golden lineup of boards offers luxury components including gold plated CPU pins, memory sockets and PCI-Express slots, golden cooling to give the best thermal dissipation and obviously you also get that “royal look” by owning a golden coloured board.

Back in May we took at look at the ECS Z77H2-AX board featuring the Z77 chipset and branded under this fancy new range of products and it certainly stood out, so much so that it walked away with our innovation award as any company willing to kit their products out in gold deserve to win something, right? Bluntly put, any company who do something so bold and outrageous as ECS did have clearly got some big balls and the fact that it was actually quite a good board, once the initial problems were rectified.

So today sees the latest socket FM2 being treated to the golden treatment with the A85F2-A which offers a whole host of features thanks to the AMD A85X chipset and of course some patented ECS features that we’ve seen on many of their products before.

As this is a top-of-the-range product from ECS, we want to take our time taking a look at the packaging and bundle that is on offer before we can check out what bling factor the ECS A85F2-A has to offer. Once this is done and dusted, we can move on to the performance and to see if having gold components and cooling solutions really does make a difference or if its all just a bit of a gimmick.