Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H Motherboard (with AMD A8-5600K) Review

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H: Packaging and Bundle3. Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H: Layout and Features4. Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H: BIOS and Overclocking5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: PCMark 77. Synthetic: 3DMark8. Synthetic: 3Dmark 119. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage10. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven11. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201312. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.513. Synthetic: Super Pi14. Synthetic: SATA Performance15. Real World: WinRAR16. Real World: MKV Playback17. Real World: Media Encoding18. Gaming: Battlefield 319. Gaming: Call of Duty Black Ops 220. Gaming: DiRT Showdown21. Technical: Power Consumption22. Closing Thoughts23. View All Pages

Today we are going to look at the Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H motherboard which supports AMD's latest Trinity APUs and occupies a Micro-ATX form factor.  We will also be looking briefly at the performance of the AMD A8-5600K APU as we haven't had a chance to test it previously.  This processor and motherboard combination isn't top-of-the-range, but should offer users a healthy balance between price and performance.

Gigabyte is renowned for producing a wide range of quality motherboards which encompass both Intel and AMD platforms.  Additionally they have a comprehensive range of models supporting the latest AMD FM2 socket, spanning from those based on the low-end A55 chipset to the more feature-filled A85X that resides on this particular model.

The F2A85XM-D3H fits in the range below the F2A85X-D3H and F2A85X-UP4 which are both full size models.  The Micro-ATX form factor of the F2A85XM-D3H makes it ideal for those looking to build a compact tower PC or a large HTPC.  We look forward to seeing how it performs in our tests.

Features

• GIGABYTE 3D BIOS technology with Dual UEFI BIOS design.
• GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™4 Classic technology.
• Supports socket FM2 AMD A-series/ Athlon-series processors.
• Enhanced AMD Radeon HD 7000-series graphics (DX11) integrated with the APU.
• 2 PCI-E 2.0 x16 interfaces with AMD Dual Graphics, Eyefinity and CrossFire support.
• Features HDMI/ Dual-link DVI/ D-sub ports for Triple-Monitor support.
• 4 native USB 3.0 ports with transfer rates of up to 5Gbps.
• 8 native SATA3 ports with up to 6Gbps link speed and RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 support.
• GIGABYTE On/Off Charge technology with 3x USB power design.

The F2A85XM-D3H is supplied in a standard Micro-ATX motherboard box which features an attractive white livery.  The front of the box is littered with various logos which illustrate the key features of the motherboard.

Turning the box over reveals a small image of the motherboard to illustrate the key features, as well as detailed information about the specifications and some of the most prominent features.  The box itself should provide a good deal of protection for the motherboard during shipping as well.

Inside the box there is a fairly limited accessory bundle included.  It includes an I/O backplate, four SATA cables and a selection of product guides and manuals.

Gigabyte have chosen to use their traditional blue and white colour scheme for this Micro-ATX motherboard which is quite unique.  We question whether users will prefer it to their newer black-themed boards as it makes it quite difficult to colour co-ordinate components.

The first thing that stood out about this motherboard for us was the lack of any heatsinks surrounding the power regulation circuitry.  This makes it quite obvious that this isn't designed for enthusiasts, potentially limiting overclocking potential, especially with increased voltages.

In the top right-hand corner of the board there is an 8-pin connector which supplies the CPU with power.

To the right of the CPU socket there are four DDR3 RAM slots which support frequencies of 1866 / 1600 / 1333 / 1066 MHz in a dual channel configuration.

The 24-pin motherboard power connector is also located on the right hand side of the motherboard, alongside a single USB3.0 internal header.

In the bottom right hand corner of the motherboard we find no fewer than eight SATA-600 ports which mean this motherboard is an ideal candidate for a home server or home theatre PC.  The chipset is also located in this area, hidden underneath a tiny heatsink.

Along the bottom edge of the motherboard there are a number of connections.  From left to right we find the audio header, S-PDIF connector, a COM header, a TPM header, two internal USB2.0 headers and the front panel connectors.

Moving around to the I/O connectors, all the basics are catered for.  From left to right we find two USB2.0 ports, a PS/2 port, VGA, DVI and HDMI jacks, an optical audio connector, two USB3.0 connectors, an RJ-45 Ethernet jack, two further USB2.0 connectors and three 3.5mm audio jacks.

All of the overclocking options in the BIOS are located under the MIT Tweaker tab.  They are separated out into different sections for controlling the CPU, Memory and Voltages, as well as two which display PC Health Status and Current MIT settings.

The BIOS features all the other settings you'd usually expect, spread under the following five tabs: System, BIOS Features, Peripherals, Power Management and Save and Exit.

Overclocking

We managed to achieve a modest 4.3 GHz overclock with the AMD Vision A8-5600K (3.6ghz default speed).  This was achieved using a baseclock of 100 MHz with a multiplier of 43x.  We used an offset voltage of +0.072V to achieve this.

See validation here.

In this review we are going to benchmark the AMD Vision A8-5600 at reference clock speeds (3.6ghz) and when overclocked to 4.3ghz, as detailed on the previous page.

Test System:

Processor: AMD Vision A8-5600
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-F2A85XM-D3H
Cooler: Phanteks PH-TC14PE
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-2
Memory: 16 GB Mushkin Blackline 1600 MHz
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7950
Power Supply: Silverstone Platinum 1000W
System Drive: Kingston HyperX 3K 240 GB
Monitor: Viewsonic VX2260WM
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)

Software:

PCMark 7
3DMark
3DMark 11
3DMark Vantage
SiSoft Sandra 2013
Cinebench R11.5
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.7
VLC Media Player
Performance Monitor
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Super Pi 1.5 Mod
CPUID Hardware Monitor
CPU-Z
DiRT Showdown
Battlefield 3
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

In this test we see a noticeable boost in system wide performance when overclocked.

3DMark is Futuremark’s latest benchmark. It can be used to benchmark and compare everything from mobile devices, such as smart phones, tablets and laptops, to high-end gaming systems. The benchmark is available for Windows, Windows RT Android and iOS.

With 3 separate tests, each of which is intended to be used alongside a specific classification of hardware, 3DMark is a very versatile benchmark. Ice Storm is intended to be used with mobile devices, Cloud Gate is good for use with laptops and home PCs, and Fire Strike can be used to push the performance of gaming PCs.

We used the ‘Fire Strike’ benchmark which is designed to be used on gaming PCs. We opted for theNormal setting, NOT the Extreme mode.

Again we see a slight bump in performance when overclocked, showing how gaming performance can be improved with a clock increase.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

Unsurprisingly, the results in 3DMark 11 closely follow what we saw in the latest version of 3DMark.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

As we would expect, overclocking significantly boosts the CPU score of the system.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render.
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux.
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems.
• Multicore CPU support.
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles).
• Powerful C++ API.
• Comprehensive performance profiling system.
• Flexible XML-based data structures.

We only see a very slight improvement in the overclocked test in Unigine as it's a very graphically intensive benchmark.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

An impressive set of results for this low cost test system.

Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

Here we can see the performance benefits available from using multi-threaded applications.  We can also see how the performance benefits from overclocking.

Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth pace after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU.

The performance of AMD CPUs is often lacking in this test and the A8-5600K is no different.

A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance. We use one of our favourite benchmark utilities – CrystalDiskMark X64 Edition – to rate performance from the on-board SATA controller.

In this test we see fairly good performance from the system and the SATA-600 connector won't limit the performance of your SSD. We are using the Kingston HyperX 3K 240 GB today.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

In this test we can see the unrestricted performance of the solid state drive which is impressive.

WinRAR is one of the most popular archive manager programs available. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. You can try WinRAR before buy, its trial version is available in downloads.

We measured the time taken to archive two 2.75 GB .MKV files.

In this test we can see a substantial reduction in the time taken to archive our two tests files when overclocked.

The Matroska Media container is a very popular, open standard Multimedia container which is usually found as .MKV files. It is a very popular format in enthusiast circles and can be played directly in VLC or Windows Media Player with suitable codecs installed.

We played our 1080P MKV movie using the latest version of VLC Media Player and measured the CPU usage with the Performance Monitor built into Windows.

The CPU usage is a little on the high side in this test, at least compared to Intel CPUs we've tested in the past.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 1.43 GB 720p MKV file to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power.  Hardware acceleration was enabled to give you a good idea of system wide real world performance.

In this test we recorded a fairly impressive result with full hardware acceleration enabled.

According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.

We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing.

In this test there was only a very small bump in performance when overclocked.

Black Ops 2 is the latest episode in the Call of Duty franchise and is one of the most popular games of the moment.  It uses an updated version of the IW engine, used in previous Call of Duty games, which isn't particularly demanding.  This makes it ideal for testing mid-range gaming systems like this.

We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing.

In Black Ops 2, there was a much bigger improvement in performance when overclocked than in Battlefield 3.

Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007.

We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing.

Again, we see a decent bump in framerate with this title when the system was overclocked.

We measured the power consumption of our entire test system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95 and GPU using FurMark. We recorded results with the system at reference clock speeds and when overclocked to 4.3 GHz.

Here we can see the power consumption only increases slightly when the system is overclocked.

Overall we are quite impressed with what the Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H has to offer.  We managed to achieve a reasonable overclock in our tests which boosted system performance considerably, despite the limited cooling for the power regulation circuitry.

This model features AMD's top-end A85X chipset which offers some interesting features such as eight SATA-600 ports and USB3.0 support.  The plentiful array of SATA ports and the compact Micro-ATX form factor make this motherboard ideal for those who want to build a media centre PC or a home server.

We feel that the A8-5600K is fairly well matched to the Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H and, at a price of £78 from Aria,  it offers good bang for buck.  We managed to bump the stock performance well with a modest overclock.

At a price of £56 from Aria, the Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H offers great value for money and is cheaper than most of the other motherboards on the market that feature the AMD A85X chipset.  This means it offers a similar feature set to much more expensive motherboards.

Pros:

• Great value for money.
• Well featured.
• Fairly decent for overclocking.

Cons:

• Unintuitive BIOS interface
• No VRM cooling.

KitGuru says: An impressive, high value motherboard from Gigabyte.

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