Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 (A85X) Motherboard Review

The main thing that I want to focus on with this board is the design and how it looks. Simply put, it’s sexy and that’s a hard thing to say about a piece of hardware, but it has to be said that over the years with motherboard manufacturers, they haven’t made some of the best choices by adding bullets, guns, knives and all other types of comical styling but it seems that things can be redeemed.

Gigabyte have done exactly that with the F2A85X-UP4 as it’s sleek black styling really makes it a hit with me and I think others will see the appeal from it. With more and more consumers looking to watercooling and companies offering custom colour designs, you’ll be able to match this board up with whatever colour chassis and fluid you have on tap (see what we did there?). This isn’t the first board Gigabyte have taken this styling approach to, but it’s certainly one of the cheaper options as this theme is normally reserved for the higher-end sockets.

Feature wise, Gigabyte have allowed the A85X chipset to do what it does best, and with that, we see a total of seven native SATA III 6Gb/s ports ready and waiting, and when overclocked, you’ll even see a slight boost in performance depending on the type of drive you have of course. One aspect that does need looking at is the USB 3.0 performance, which while we’re happy to see a rear I/O stacked with a total of four USB 3.0 ports and of course the internal header; the performance wasn’t exactly outstanding and that’s a real shame, but we can only assume that it’s driver related.

Taking a look at the rest of the performance, we clearly saw that within PCMark7, the board ticked all of the right boxes by giving some clear cut results, ahead of the competition. When overclocked, the performance saw some nice gains across a variety of tests ranging from memory, to gaming to overall system performance and for a novice or advanced user, a clock speed of 4.4GHz should be fairly easy to achieve and with extra time and advanced cooling, we keep hearing good things about the new line of Trinity APUs from AMD.

As we expected prior to the launch of the new FM2 platform and AMDs lineup of processor products, we had a price point of around £100 in our heads, and the Gigabyte board we looked at today sees no disappointment in this area coming in just below the £100 mark from certain retailers and we can’t help but feel for the money, you have some serious bang for buck on your plate and that’s why we’re happy to award it with just that; the Bang for Buck Award.