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ASRock FM2 A85X-ITX Motherboard Review

James White
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AMD has finally delivered on the new Richland APUs. And yes, they come with complete backwards compatibility. The question is, are any of the motherboards that were designed for the FM2 socket and Trinity still worth using with their latest chip? Or do you need something more? ASRock, a leader in innovative motherboard design, might have had the answer all this time, with the ASRock FM2 A85X-ITX. Maybe big things do come in small packages?

Features and Specifications

The FM2 A85X-ITX is a board designed to be paired with the AMD Trinity APUs and comes with all the bells and whistles you would expect. It fully supports AMD Steady Video 2.0, Dual Graphics, DirectX 11, AMD HD 7000 series integrate graphics, and AMD AMP!. In fact this board will even work with the Intel XMP profiles to ensure the best possible use of your RAM, in case it doesn’t support AMD’s AMP! profiles. This is just part of the package before ASRock added even more features.

ASRock is well-known for their ability to put a lot of premium features in their smaller boards. The FM2 A85X-ITX is no different as it has support for XFast RAM, LAN, and USB for performance boosts were it matters most. It also comes with the overclocking tool AXTU for easy, safe, overclocking, and boot to UEFI for easy access to manual overclocking options.

Some of the more unique features you will find is the ASRock Dehumidifier which will help keep the air in your room dry and minimize boot failures caused by high humidity.

Now that we know how you control all the features of the FM2 A85X-ITX, lets look at what you will be controlling.

This ASRock board features Dual-stacked MOSFETS, all gold 100% Japanese premium solid caps, RAM support up to 2400+ MHz in two DIMM slots, three video outputs with triple monitor support (D-Sub, DVI-D and HDMI), and one full-sized x16 PCI-E slot. There is also plenty of storage room with seven SATA3 connectors, up to four USB 3.0 ports (2 in rear, 2 from on-board header), and two USB 2.0 ports. That is a lot of ports for an ITX board that boasts 7.1 audio, LAN, and CIR support as well.

All of this comes in at an MSRP of around the $120 US mark, which is highly competitive in the AMD FM2 motherboard space.

What’s in the Box?

The great thing about the ASRock FM2 A85X-ITX board is that all the great things are built into the board or derived from its flexible BIOS/software support system. There really isn’t any hardware you need to add to get all its great features. ASRock instead used this to save we consumers some money with minimal hardware accessories. In addition to the board, you will find the I/O shield, four SATA3 cables, user manual, and quick start guide.

I would normally have something to say about the lack of accessories, but this is a different situation. Stand alone premium ITX motherboards on the AMD platform usual have an MSRP around the $120 and are used mainly for DIY LAN party systems. Second, as we have seen in the past, most ITX motherboards don’t have four SATA cables included. You might get one or two if you’re lucky.

Let’s grab a closer look at the board itself next.

First Impressions

After all the research, planning, waiting on shipments, the first time you put your hands on a new component should be awe-inspiring. The ASRock FM2A85X-ITX doesn’t disappoint.

It makes great use of the minimal space it has to work with. The seven SATA 3.0 ports and full 7.1 surround sound analog output are the first things we noticed. Usually, you’d only find 5.1 audio on most ITX boards, and maybe only four SATA ports. This is clearly done by leveraging the power of the AMD Hudson-D4 chipset to avoid the need for secondary controllers.

The next thing you will see on the ASRock FM2 A85X-ITX, is the inclusion of a few legacy ports on the rear I/O panel. In today’s market, I don’t see any reason to include a PS/2 port or a VGA port. We would have preferred if ASRock included a DisplayPort output or two more USB 2.0 ports. This is an odd choice to us as the PS/2 port is not a hybrid port, but a dedicate keyboard port. We also would like to see the inclusion of a Wi-Fi adapter on an ITX board like this.

Software and BIOS Impressions

ASRock clearly intended this ITX board to be a jack-of-all-trades. For example, if you’re building a family computer, you have the OMG to set Internet Curfews for children and APP Charger to charge devices while syncing content. If you’re building a LAN Party system, then the AXTU and X-Boost will help you get the most out of your system. Then you have Easy RAID for that home server build. No matter what you are using the board for, the ASRock X Series of software such as the XFast RAM, XFast LAN, and X-Boost will bring your system to a new level of speed.

Once you get your system built and you are ready to boot it for the first time, you will be greeted by the same great UEFI BIOS on all of ASRock’s boards. The UEFI BIOS has a gold star background that flickers while you are using it. Actions you take are accompanied by audio cues which help you to know when an option has been changed. You will find a few new things here such as the Internet Flash.

I know all of us here at Futurelooks and many people in the DIY community, have run into hardware compatibility issues during a build that a BIOS update would fix. But how to you update the BIOS if you can’t install the OS? Internet Flash by ASRock is here to put an end to borrowing parts from friends, or downloading USB BIOS update utilities from another PC. You can now just Flash the BIOS from within the UEFI BIOS with no OS installed. We recommend this as the first thing you do with the FM2A85X-ITX board to ensure full support of your APU.

I could do an entire article about the included software and UEFI BIOS of the ASRock A85X-ITX board, but you all want to see it in action. We will let the ASRock ITX board speak for itself in the charts and performance when compared to a top-tier Full ATX board paired with a CPU with twice as many cores.

Test System Setup

The system I am working with for test is geared mainly toward those looking to build a LAN Party system. If the ASRock FM2A85X-ITX can measure up as a gaming system, then everything else should be a cake walk. I have paired the A10-6800K (flagship APU at the time of writing this review) with an Nvidia GTX 770 2GB GPU. I also used the XMP profile support from the board dictate the RAM speed.

We have already seen what the AMD A10-6800K can do on its own, so we are going to treat the ASRock ITX board like any other motherboard we review. In fact, I will be directly comparing it to my everyday gaming system’s GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD7 + AMD FX-8350 with all the other parts being the same.

Hardware:

Software:

  • Windows 7 Pro 64-bit with all latest updates
  • AMD 13.12 Platform and Graphics Drivers
  • Battlefield 4
  • Metro 2033: Last Light
  • OCCT
  • FurMark GPU Stress Test
  • PCMark 8
  • 3DMark Pro 1.1
  • Crystal Disk Mark 3
  • RMAA 6
  • AIDA64 Extreme Edition

The test setup here is a little dated now thanks to the very recent release of new AMD APUs. The same could be said of the motherboard we are reviewing as well. But it was a big seller only two months ago. We will get around to looking at the new generation of ITX motherboards with the new APUs, but we need to see where they are coming from first. This will give us a great baseline to compare them against.

Let’s get on with the testing!

Overall Performance (PCMark8)

This test, as with many of the tests today, will favor the more powerful FX-8350. We will start with PCMark 8 since it can test the system in low, mid, and high performance use. The home test focuses on general use including web browsing, video playback, low performance gaming etc. The Work suite focus on basic work needs such as word processing and web browsing.

Finally the Creative test pushes the system to the edge with high performance Adobe photo editing, and GPU accelerated tasks via OpenCL. Lets see how the ASRock ITX board holds up.

The results fit right into our expectations and show where the builds differ. The 4 additional cores will give the FX-8350/GA990FXA-UD7 an advantage in all tests were the CPU plays a major role. On the hand, both systems will be using the Nvidia GeForce 770, so any test with a GPU focus are relatively even. As you can see, when the CPU tasks are not that intense such as the work suite both motherboards are still close.

Overall Gaming Performance (3DMark Pro)

Let’s break everything down into groups and focus on what is actually different in performance. We will start with a focus on gaming performance when comparing 990FXA-UD7 to the ASRock A85X-ITX. In these test we will still be using the CPU for physics calculations to verify if the CPU is the root of any performance difference we may see in real world tests.

There is a clear, and expected, difference in physics performance with the FX-8350 showing off its muscle. While the additional cores more than double the physics performance, it has minimal impact in gaming and the overall score. This is great news as the smaller ASRock A85X-ITX board can be used confidently, to build a LAN party system, with little impact to gaming performance. In fact, lets put that to the test with real world gaming performance.

Real World Gaming Performance (Battlefield 4 and Metro: Last Light)

One of the many things we as DIY enthusiasts like about an ITX motherboard, is their small stature as the core of lighter weight LAN party systems. The question is always how much power you give up when not using a full ATX board. Lets find out if you are giving up anything worth noting.

There is a difference in power between the two boards as expected. The A85X-ITX comes in on the lower side of course, but not by much. The average performance for Metro: Last Light and Battlefield 4 is only 3 to 5 FPS lower with the ASRock motherboard. It actually takes the lead in the maximum FPS by a frame or two.

The real difference was when large numbers of physics calculations are needed for close explosions. I could feel the system slowing down and the “chopping” in performance in these situations; however, these drops are very infrequent and only lasts for a few seconds. The 990FXA-UD7 manages to keep a higher minimum FPS especially in Battlefield 4. This is nothing a Richland APU and a little overclocking can’t minimize.

SATA 6 Gbps I/O Performance (CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 and ATTO Disk Benchmark)

Lets set aside the gaming performance and look more at the motherboards themselves. One of the most important things about a motherboard is I/O performance. These tests will also remove the CPU and GPU as the main focus. This time it’s all about the boards and what each can do.

There is no question that the FM2A85X-ITX has the clear win here with SSD and HDD performance consistently better in every test. The only time the larger, more power-hungry 990FXA-UD7 takes the lead is SSD Seq. read. Lets see if we could keep this trend going with I/O tests for the USB outputs.

USB 2.0 I/O Performance (CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1)

Now we are going to compare the I/O of the 990FXA-UD7 to the FM2A85X-ITX. This time we are going to include the XFast USB software in the results in addition to normal performance. This will give us a chance to show exactly what ASRock brings to the table.

General performance of USB 2.0 is better on the A85X-ITX board with a few exceptions. Even better is that the XFast USB by ASRock increases performance across the board. In the test where the A85X-ITX already had an advantage, the advantage is increased with this software.

In the two tests were the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 had the lead, the XFast USB quickly makes up the difference. If you have an ASRock board like the FM2A85X-ITX we are testing, turn on your XFast software immediately.

Now we are going to run these exact same tests with a USB 3.0 drive.

USB 3.0 I/O Performance (CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1)

This is an opportunity to show not only the I/O performance of the A85X-ITX, but the throughput gains by switching to USB 3.0 over 2.0. Once again we are including the XFast USB software in the test results. These tests were done with USb 3.0 enclosure housing a Western Digital 10k RPM 1 TB HDD.

This time the results are not so clear-cut with the 990FXA-UD7 taking more tests this go around. Both it and the FM2A85X-ITX are pretty much even until the XFast USB is turned back on. It gives the FM2A85X-ITX a 10 to 20 MB/s jump Sequential and Random read/write tests putting it well ahead of the competition.

Audio Performance (RightMark Audio Analyzer 6.2.3)

The ASRock FM2A85X-ITX is limited by it size in one particular area: expandability. In our testing, we were using the only available PCI-E slot for the Nvidia GeForce 770 graphics card leaving no other expansion options. This means anyone using this motherboard with a dedicated graphics card can only use the on-board Realtek ALC892 Audio Codec. Lets see how well it stands up in testing.

We have noticed a trend in on-board audio systems for motherboards. Audio performance in general is usually pretty good, but will have a weakness in one or more areas. The ASRock FM2A85X-ITX’s weakness show up in the noise compensation. The actual out of sound during testing had no noticeable issues thanks to the better than average noise level control. The noise is clearly there, but more often than not it is too low to hear in real world use.

Power Consumption

Let us start by saying that testing the power consumption for these two boards is not really a fair comparison. While there were a number of improvements in this area with the Vishera FX-8350 we are using in all the tests, we are aware of the AMD FX series of processors tendency to use large amounts of power at full load. With that in mind, take these results with a large grain of salt.

In this test the ASRock FM2A85X-ITX took a commanding lead in power consumption. It maintains an average of less than 50 watts at idle. A full 40 watts lower than the UD7/FX-8350 combo. At full load this gap gets even wider with the A85X coming in around 210 watts compared to the 990FXA-UD7 at 320 watts. We have to declare this one a no contest. But in terms of academics, it’s an interesting data point along with the others, for the smaller ITX platforms.

Final Thoughts

I find myself at a loss of words here. We tested the ASRock FM2A85X-ITX by comparing it to what should be considered a far superior GA-990FXA-UD7 motherboard, only to find that it more than holds its own. The FM2A85X-ITX shows very little difference in real world gaming performance, exceptional I/O performance, and only falls behind in CPU intensive tasks, which we expected. The latter of which is no fault of the motherboard itself.

This motherboard is an amazing little marvel with plenty to offer any DIY build. Especially the ones that call for mini-ITX. The included software proves itself to be more than just fluff with the USB XFast software in particular, moving performance for 10% to 20% gains in USB speed alone. While we had some difficulty with a way to record a performance difference in XFast LAN and RAM, I plan to keep working with it so we can see what this software really has to offer in a future review.

The ASRock FM2A85X-ITX was one of only 3 mini-ITX boards available just a few months ago, two of which were provided by ASRock. The only really draw backs to the motherboard are all inherent weaknesses of the mini-ITX form factor. Crowded on-board ports, only one PCI-E slot, CPU cooler clearance, are just some of the issues. We do have to note this, but we really can’t hold it against it; this would be like saying a compact car is too small.

Although the boards are starting to become scarce, if you are lucky enough to have one, then pair it with an AMD A-6800K and don’t look back. I will be a while before something truly better comes along. If you are not one of the lucky few with this board, then keep the ASRock FM2A88X-ITX+ and FM2A78M-ITX+ at the top of your list. If it’s as good as this board, then they will be spectacular.

Pros

  • AMD A85X Hudson D4 chipset
  • Support for XMP 1.3 and AMP 1.2 memory profiles
  • BIOS update via Internet from within the BIOS
  • 7 SATA 6 Gb/s ports
  • Quality 7.1 HD audio
  • Large variety of included software
  • Great performance gains from included ASRock Software

Cons

  • Limited overclocking potential
  • Not all including software will be helpful to end-user
  • Crowded port layout

 

Overall Score: 9.0 / 10.0

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