ECS A85F2-A Golden motherboard review

Right, we start off with packaging as always, so you  know what to look for in the stores. The motherboard by the way falls in the Golden series which you can recognize by the overall aesthetics, have a peek:

For entry level motherboards and APUs, you have to acknowledge that is a good looking motherboard right there. The focus of this motherboard is that it has a dark/gold looking design whilst remaining competitive with pricing. ECS applied cold coating on pretty much everything possible. 

The rear I/O panel - It is just check full with goodies. USB ports, four 3.0 , 7.1 VIA VT1819 Audio and Gigabit Ethernet (Realtek RTL8111E). You will miss a legacy PS/2 port here, and check out the four different display connectors including HDMI and DisplayPort will delight the triple-display Eyefinity aficionados. Next to that DVI and the really outdated VGA connector.

When we flip the board around a little we see some more good lovin.  Components wise we only see quality really, solid gold colored capacitors, solid core chokes flavored gold as well, quality components and nothing else, which ensures stability -- but also reliability and extended lifespan. There is 4 x DIMM DDR3 socket support up to 64GB DIMM support with Support for DDR3 up to 1333/1600/1866 and 2133 and 2600 when overclocked. The motherboard has Socket FM2 for AMD A series Trinity processors, also referred to as A85 - This board supports CPU up to 100W TDP.

When we flip the board once more we see lot's of stuff going on. To the far right gold chokes and capacitors, then a good 7x SATA 6GBps ports, all leading directly from the FCH. That's impressive, the  6Gb/s ports have  RAID 0/1/5/10 capability as well. If you like to build a cheap NAS, here is your answer. We tested the controller with a SATA3 SSD and the performance is impressive.

The chipset has another feature it will allow for two primary PCIe x16 slots (the 2nd slot is electrically x8 though), so yeah Crossfire 2-way is an option. Also the spacing in-between the slots is 3-slots, meaning you could fit two 3-slot graphics cards. Also two PCi slots and thee PCIe 1x slots have been included. 

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