Gigabyte F2A85XN-WIFI Mini-ITX Motherboard Review

Gigabyte has chosen to use an all-black colour scheme for the F2A85XN-WIFI, meaning it’s very unlikely to clash with your other components. It conforms to the mini-ITX form factor and should therefore be compatible with almost all PC cases on the market.

Even though this is a mini-ITX motherboard, Gigabyte has still chosen to install a heatsink above the power regulation circuitry to improve cooling. This is one small step towards achieving a decent overclock with this motherboard.

The CPU socket is located in the centre of the motherboard, flanked on either side by the stock AMD CPU cooler mounting brackets. There isn’t a huge amount of room around the CPU socket and many large CPU coolers will probably foul the surrounding components.

If you’re not familiar with the mini-ITX form factor, you may be initially a little confused when looking for certain components on the motherboard as manufacturers tend to move them all round to fit more on the PCB. For example, the 4-pin power connector is located south-west of the CPU socket.

The two DDR3 memory slots are located along the right-hand edge of the motherboard and support up to 64 GB of memory with frequencies of 2400(OC)/1866/1600/1333/1066 MHz.

We find the 24-pin power connector located in the top right-hand corner of the motherboard alongside the four SATA-600 connectors. These are connected to the A85X chipset and support RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, and JBOD configurations. The Atheros Dual Band 802.11 a/b/g/n 300Mbps Wi-Fi card is also located in this area. This card also supports Bluetooth 4.0.

Moving further along the top edge of the motherboard we find an internal USB3.0 header alongside the chipset which is covered with a small silver heatsink. We also find the front panel header located in this area alongside a USB2.0 header and a couple of 3-pin fan headers.

Finally, there is a single PCI Express x16 lane spanning the bottom edge of the motherboard.

On the rear I/O panel we find the following connections:

• 1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port
• 2 x HDMI ports
• 1 x DVI-D port
• 2 x Wi-Fi antenna connectors
• 2 x USB 3.0/2.0 ports
• 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
• 1 x RJ-45 port
• 1 x Optical S/PDIF Out connector
• 5 x Audio jacks (Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out, Rear Speaker Out, Line In, Line Out, Mic In)

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