Asus’ F2A85-M Pro costs twice as much as
the next cheapest FM 2 board on test, and it’s also noticeable pricier than the
MSIA85A-GD65, which sports the same A85X chipset.
It’s also a micro-ATX board, so it’s
understandably thin on expansion options, with just two 16x PCI-Eslots and two
1x slots located in between. There’s no PCI slot and, unlike the cheaper MSI,
there are no power, reset or CMOS clear buttons either. However, there are
seven SATA connectors, six of which are angled, plus Asus’ usual perks such as
USB BIOS Flashback and its Al Suite II Software, including Fan Xpert 2.
The layout doesn’t have issues either, with
the 8-pin EPS 12V connector and 24-pin ATX connector both located at the edge
of the PCB, although you’ll lose one of the 1x PCI-E slots if you use a
discrete dual-slot GPU. As you’d expect at this rice, the F2A85-M Pro also has
the full complement of video outputs, including Display Port, HDMI and DVI-D.
Plus, should you wish to dabble in some dual-GPU malarkey, it also supports
Cross Fire X, with its two 16x PCI-E slots running at 8x with two graphics
cards installed.
At stock speed, the F2A85-M Pro proved to
be slightly faster overall than both me A75-based motherboards on test, beating
them in all our Media Benchmarks tests with an overall score of 1,407 around 30
points ahead, although this equates to less than 3 percent. In our game tests,
it was much the same, with the F2A85-M Pro slightly ahead but not by much, with
minimum frame rates of 26fps in Skyrim using on-board graphics and 48fps in
Crysis 2 with a discrete GPU. It was also slightly ahead in the SATA tests,
with a lead of a few megabytes per second over the other motherboards.
Overclocking the F2A85-M Pro was also easy,
thanks to another cracking EFI system from Asus. We were quickly up to 4.4GHz
after setting the vcore to 1.485V, and disabling the AMD Power Now and C6 state
options. Sadly, we couldn’t reach 4.5GHz, as we managed with the Gigabyte and
MSI boards, though, with Prime95 persistently failing on the second core.
Thankfully, this didn’t have a huge impact on speed tests; the F2A85-M Pro lost
its lead but overclocking still saw 60 points added to the overall Media
Benchmarks score. We also managed to increase the GPU clock speed to 1GHz;
along with the CPU overclock, this added 1 fps to the minimum in Skyrim.
Conclusion
The F2A85-M Pro is a solid FM2 board with
the usual Asus perks. However, it price is ludicrous given how similarly all
the other boards on test performed. It has marginal speed advantages at stock
speeds, but there’s little other evidence to justify the extra outlay.
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Details
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Madras: Excellent EFI system; good layout;
plenty of features
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Korma: Double the price of A75 motherboards
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Product code: F2A85-M pro
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Price: $164
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Manufacturer http://www.asus.com
Scores
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Speed: 41/ 45
·
Features: 27/ 30
·
Value: 12/ 25
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