Excellent value, great performance and tons of expansion make this a brilliant FM2 motherboard
Written By
Published on 2 March 2013
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best buy
1 / 3
Our rating
Reviewed price £60 inc VAT
The F2A85XM-D3H is one of Gigabyte’s latest FM2 motherboards, and it supports AMD’s Trinity processors and uses the high-end A85X chipset, while still being excellent value.
As you’d expect from one of AMD’s latest chipsets, the F2A85XM-D3H is packed full of the latest features. You’ll find that all eight of the SATA connectors are SATA3 ports, so you’ll be able to get the fastest speed out of an SSD and make your computer boot as quickly as possible. Eight SATA ports also means that there’s plenty of room to connect more storage than you’ll ever likely need.
We’re pleased to say that USB3 is supported, with two ports on the rear of the motherboard. With a USB3 header, too, you can increase this by connecting up USB3 ports from your case, or just adding a blanking plate. In addition there are four USB ports at the rear and two additional USB headers for adding more ports.
The back panel also has a PS/2 port, an optical S/PDIF out connector and three 3.5mm audio outputs. These support 5.1 channels of audio, but if you use the motherboard’s header to connect front-panel audio outputs, you can get 7.1 channels of audio.
The processor’s onboard graphics are supported by VGA, DVI-D and HDMI ports. All of them can be used together, so you can run three monitors from the onboard graphics. This gives you flexibility in the number and types of monitors that you want to connect.
There are two PCI-E x16 slots for discrete graphics, which can be used in CrossfireX mode. The first slot runs at x16 speed, while the second slot runs at just x4 speed. We’d have preferred them to share bandwidth equally, so that they run at x8 speed when used together.
There are lots of expansion options, including four DDR3 DIMM memory slots for a maximum of 64GB of RAM. There’s also a single PCI-E x1 slot, but this gets blocked if you install a graphics card. There’s also a single PCI slot for expansion, which isn’t blocked by other cards.
With an AMD A10-5800K processor and 4GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM, our benchmarks returned a score of 66 overall. This is around what we’d expect from an A10-5800K. Should you want to push your processor further, the UEFI BIOS has full overclocking control, although its unintuitive interface makes this a little trickier than on other motherboards.
The Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H is a great FM2 motherboard with tons of features. Given its incredibly low price, we can forgive any minor flaws. If you want a Trinity processor, this motherboard is a great companion for it and it wins a Best Buy award.
Written by
Katharine Byrne
When Katharine's not glued to her Wii U and 3DS, she's usually found darting between tiny smartphones and huge pieces of home cinema equipment.She’s tested everything from laptops and monitors to motherboards and projectors, but she currently specialises in smartphones, games and AV.
