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With the new FM2 socket upon us, we take a quick look at the latest FM2-A85XA-G65 board from MSI
The latest chipset from Intel, the Z77, has been around for a little while now and has certainly spurred a lot of interest by aftermarket motherboard manufacturers. Little actually changed between the Z68 chipset and the Z77 chipset. Z77 added Smart connect to let you receive emails while your computer is asleep and Rapid Start to speed up boot times. With so little changing, it is up to the manufacturers to pack their motherboards so full of features that they stand out above the rest of the competition. That is exactly what Biostar has done with the Hi-Fi Z77X.
This is our second of two reviews today, focusing on the official launch of AMD’s A10 5800K when paired up with partner motherboards. In our other review we have paired up the new AMD APU with a high end AMD discrete graphics card to see how it compares against a Core i3 and Core i7 system. Many people say that you don’t need an ultra high end processor just for gaming so we though it was interesting to specifically cover that topic. The review you are reading now however concentrates on the onboard HD 7660D graphics. Is 1080p gaming finally a possibility if don’t want to buy a discrete card?
Not too long ago we had the pleasure of covering ASRock’s mid-range offering, the Z77 Extreme6. Since then, ASRock have continued to release new motherboards to fit each market segment, including the board we have in front of us today, the Z77 OC Formula. Geared towards overclockers and tweakers, the Z77 OC Formula sports both air and watercooled VRMs, 12 CPU power phases, an 8-layer Copper PCB, dual stack MOSFETs, Multi-Filter caps and a whole slew of other features and benefits, this new board promises to be the best performing board from ASRock that we’ve seen to date. As an overclocker, I love to see boards like this. Anything that can help increase stability or achieve clock speeds at lower voltages gets a big grin from me. I usually spend more time getting the last drop of performance out of my components than I actually spend utilizing said performance, so having a product like this to play with is like Christmas come early.
With AMD releasing the new FM2 platform, we start things off by looking at the MSI FM2-A85XA-G65.
Excellent overclocking performance at an affordable price. We have waited years for a motherboard like the Z77 MPower. Why? Because every time a manufacturer comes with a motherboard aimed at overclockers, it is filled with other features that aren't useful for overclocking. MSI kept those extra features to a minimum on the Z77 MPower board. If you are an overclocker, then the Z77 MPower should be on your wish list, it's as simple as that.
Today we are going to look at MSI‘s latest mini-ITX offering, the Z77IA-E53 motherboard. It’s designed for users who are looking to build a powerful compact system based around the Intel Z77 platform. This makes it ideal for building a compact LAN gaming system in a case such as the Bitfenix Prodigy.
Mostly we cover high end motherboards at the Shrimps due to our enthusiast reviewing nature. However not everybody has the funds to opt for a 200 or more Euros board. Sometimes a balance has to be found between the different components used, to stay below a certain budget. Most compromises have to be made in onboard features. Users tend to cash out more on the fastest CPU and/or GPU they can afford. In builds it's usually with motherboards where cutbacks are done and sometimes even a motherboard with a lower specced chipset is chosen. For socket 1155 MSI offers the budget minded user the choice to be able to buy a motherboard, based on the high end socket 1155 Intel Z77 chipset, yet all at a very affordable price. That's where the Z77A-G43 pops up, time to give the board a spin in the Madshrimps lab.
ASRock has a new high-end Socket 1155 motherboard specially aimed at overclockers, and the extra features reflect this. Professional overclocker Nick Shih assisted with the design of the ASRock Z77 OC Formula board, and also added a number of custom overclocking profiles.
With the launch of the new Trinity platform, can the Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 keep up with the competition?
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