ASRock Releases A85X Based Mini ITX Motherboard

News
By Niels Broekhuijsen
published

ASRock has announced a mini ITX motherboard with AMD's A85X chipset onboard, giving this little motherboard a big feature set.

While most other mini ITX boards come with either an A55 or A75 chipset, ASRock has decided to take it one step further and equip its new FM2A85X-ITX board with a more capable A85X chipset, definitely a luxury in its class.

The motherboard makes few sacrifices in terms of features over its full-size ATX brothers with the A85X chipset. ASRock's FM2A85X-ITX comes with two DDR3 memory slots, one PCIe 2.0 x16-slot, five analog audio jacks and an optical SPDIF output, plenty of USB ports among which two rear USB 3.0 ports and an onboard header for an additional two USB 3.0 ports. Moreover the user will find a single eSata port, a noteworthy seven SATA3 ports (supporting RAID 0/1/10), gigabit ethernet and the usual handful of VGA, DVI and HDMI ports.

The motherboard will support the current Trinity lineup of AMD's APUs and will also likely gain support for the upcoming Richland lineup. The motherboard will also support a maximum of 32 GB of dual-channel DDR3-1866 memory.

ASRock's FM2A85X-ITX is expected to hit the market anytime soon with an MSRP price of $110.

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Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

14 Comments Comment from the forums
  • jhansonxi
    Would make a great little server board if it supported unbuffered ECC memory.
    Reply
  • WithoutWeakness
    Quite a feature-rich little board. Given that this runs the A-series APU's you could make a nice little HTPC that could also handle some casual gaming without needing a separate GPU. 7 SATA3 ports also opens up the option for a handy little file server.
    Reply
  • A Bad Day
    jhansonxiWould make a great little server board if it supported unbuffered ECC memory.
    Bonus if the server tasks use GPU computing.
    Reply
  • Onus
    This is indeed a nice little board. With a MSRP of $110, it will likely hit at $95-$100. Hopefully we'll see it thoroughly reviewed here, and/or used in the SBM.
    Reply
  • ta152h
    I'm still waiting for an E2-2000 based Mini-ITX, which would better suited for this market, but the availability of even E2-1800 based motherboards is extremely limited, forget about E2-2000.

    ASUS made an announcement, but still no product.
    Reply
  • ananke
    wow, this is a nice one. 7 SATA ports = very nice
    Reply
  • dark_knight33
    Exciting NAS board. 7 SATA ports (8 with esata passthrough), low power, lots of features. Would love to roll this in my file server.
    Reply
  • Wisecracker
    If you know of any other FM2 mini-ITX motherboards, we'd all like to hear about them ...



    Reply
  • ingtar33
    not sure what's different from a A75X MB... since last i knew the biggest difference in chipset between the two was xfire/sli support and 4 monitor support (vs 3)... and since a mini-itx has but one PCIe slot xfire is a moot point... and since the trinity can't push out gaming level 1080p graphics its doubtful you'll find a need for 4 monitors.

    seems sorta pointless to me.
    Reply
  • jhansonxi
    ingtar33not sure what's different from a A75X MB.Looks like 2 SATA ports and RAID 5 support:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_chipsets#Fusion_controller_hubs_.28FCH.29
    Reply