ASUS F2A85-V Pro Review: A Look at FM2 with A85X

Final Words

Concluding a review of the first motherboard of a new chipset is difficult.  New chipset usually means new processors, so a lot of what a reviewer has to say ends up being more about the processors in question.  As a performance enthusiast that means I am not that happy with Trinity as a performance product – the Piledriver cores leave a lot to be desired.  The processor trades a lot of blows with the i3-3225 results we included in the testing, but the big ‘stick out like a sore thumb’ point of contention for me was the single thread performance in 3DPM – 106.52 scored by the i3-3225 at 3.3 GHz against 74.36 scored by the A10-5800K at 4.2 GHz.  This obviously has a knock on effect in gaming, whereby a lot of modern games still require a decent single core speed to deliver the best performance, and AMD knew this so the increase in the IGP was expected.  As mentioned in Anand’s Trinity article, as a result the Trinity IGP outperforms the HD4000 by a good margin, making small screen gaming enjoyable.

But this is a motherboard review, the first of the new chipset.  The F2A85-V Pro retails for $140, more than the high end Trinity processor.  That is a tough pill to swallow on any platform, regardless of processor, so there has to be functionality to match.  The main message ASUS likes to give is the wealth of experience and R&D that underpin every product – additional controllers on board that help with power management, control over the power delivery, control over the fans and control over the network ports.  ASUS boards are easy to use, and for a large part deliver what a user should want or need in the experience of a motherboard product.

With FM2 giving eight SATA 6 Gbps ports, there is no real reason to add extra SATA controllers, so none are added here.  We get an extra ASMedia USB 3.0 controller though to take the USB 3.0 ports to six in total – the ASMedia controller can take advantage of the UASP protocol through ASUS’ software.  We have the full gamut of video outputs, and I was surprised to learn that the DVI-D output took like a duck to water when plugged in to my Korean 27” – flawless in applying BIOS and OS visuals to which Ivy Bridge does not.

Performance wise there was only one obvious point of concern -  the DPC Latency which spiked to 600 microseconds under normal usage.  This should be fixed with a BIOS update.

Overclocking seemed like a never ending process, but we ended up with 4.5 GHz on our review sample.  Again there is not much we can draw from this result, except the fact that 300 MHz is not a large overclock on a chip that has a turbo mode of 4.2 GHz.  This is shown clearly by ASUS’ auto overclocking software, which only achieves 4.3 GHz and 4.4 GHz on ‘Fast’ and ‘Extreme’ settings respectively.

As much as Trinity is cementing the base for AMD’s future growth in terms of architecture, Ivy Bridge has such a lead on the CPU space that there are few reasons to jump on board to Trinity.  As part of an IGP based system, such as a HTPC, there are many merits to Trinity as Ganesh has found out.  From my perspective, a storage system the RAID 5 that the A85X chipset supports across the eight SATA 6 Gbps ports is golden where Trinity is concerned.

Addendum 10/17: When this review was first published, I showed some incorrect results from monitoring voltages.  Unfortunately I attributed this to the potential behavior of the motherboard, but further tests have indicated that the third-party software was at fault.  We have pulled the results to remove confusion and would like to apologize to ASUS for this error.