Asus provides the best overclocking on its exorbitantly-priced F2A85-V Pro, while ASRock offers the best price on its FM2A85X Extreme6, which doesn't overclock as well. Charting performance-per-dollar might it easier for some folks to choose a winner, but we also need to discuss the feature set each platform offers at its price point.

Setting a $100 baseline, the FM2A58X Extreme6 includes a x16-length PCIe x4 slot, an extra USB 3.0 controller, internal power and reset buttons, a Port 80 diagnostics display, and an I/O panel-based CLR_CMOS button. All of those features have gotten cheaper over the past few years, but that combination should still be worth at least $20 over a board that lacks them. Unfortunately, we don’t have any $80 baseline boards to compare.
Instead, we jump up $10 in price to the MSI FM2-A58XA-G65. MSI buyers gain the firm’s OC Genie button, but lose out on ASRocks’ integrated Port 80 diagnostics display. MSI buyers gain a PCI slot, but lose a PCIe x4 slot. MSI buyers gain a cooler-running voltage regulator, but lose out on ASRock’s extra pair of I/O panel-based USB 3.0 ports. These boards offer similar apparent worth, so the extra $10 hurts MSI's value proposition.
Gigabyte’s F2A85X-UP4 appears to be a higher-quality part than ASRock’s. Its feature set is nearly identical though, and that makes it hard for us to justify a $25 price premium.
The A85F2-A Golden from ECS actually loses features compared to ASRock’s model, and we can’t use its gold-plated connectors to excuse the $27 price increase.
Compared to ASRock’s sample, the Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT gains a PCI slot, moves its PCIe x4 slot to a place where it’s useful only for single-slot cards, gains an mSATA/mini-PCIe combo connector, and adds dual BIOSes with manual switching. This editor would love to give Sapphire an award based on that manual firmware selector alone, but the tiny switch and the spare ROM cannot justify the board’s $35 higher price. Even if Sapphire were to drop its price by 10%, a mere one-year warranty would continue to diminish its award worthiness.
And so, we pick up at the end of the conclusion where we left off at the beginning, trying to choose between the best-in-class Asus F2A8F-V Pro and the best-value ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6. We even have awards for the best-in-class and best-value categories. Best of Tom’s Hardware is an exclusive award, though. Nevertheless, we're happy to put both boards on even footing with Tom's Hardware Approved recognition. Between the two, the platform you choose will depend on the system you're trying to build.
- AMD's Answer To Ivy Bridge-Based Core i3
- ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6
- FM2A85X Extreme6 Firmware
- Asus F2A85-V Pro
- F2A85-V Pro Firmware
- ECS A85F2-A Golden
- A85F2-A Golden Firmware
- Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4
- F2A85X-UP4 Firmware
- MSI FM2-A85XA-G65
- FM2-A85XA-G65 Firmware
- Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT
- Pure Platinum A85XT Firmware
- Test Settings And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3
- Benchmark Results: F1 2012
- Benchmark Results: Skyrim
- Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: File Compression
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Overclocking
- Of Six Socket FM2 Boards, Two Rise To The Top


These sound like great ideas for a platform-oriented story. In fact, Thomas and I have discussed doing a piece on memory and Trinity. Maybe we could expand that to include an exploration of graphics and processor bottlenecks, too. Thanks for the feedback!
You still have never posted your 1GHz+ clocked GPU results.
I am also upset that you didn't run the gaming benches with the OCed RAM. I want to know how a PROPERLY configured setup like this could perform.
8% gains approx from going to 1866 over 1600, does higher clocks after this have any effect?
How does OCing the GPU part limit your CPU clock OCs? or is the heat not too bad ?
So many questions unanswered....
Sneaky, lol. Now he's going to be downvoted.
Penalizing a company over a PCB's color is asinine and petty. Even if you have a case with an acrylic window, do you stare into your PC all day and night? If so, that is trend I don't care for.
There are much more important things to worry about, like quality, price, and features, to name a few...
"Adoby Creative Suite"
just one?
who cares, good job to crash and the rest of the crew . . .
edit: i had to fix a typo . .oh karma!
Heh, apparently, editing motherboard round-ups in a Thanksgiving food coma is not conducive to catching typos. Got that one as well--thanks looniam!
You still have never posted your 1GHz+ clocked GPU results.
I am also upset that you didn't run the gaming benches with the OCed RAM. I want to know how a PROPERLY configured setup like this could perform.
8% gains approx from going to 1866 over 1600, does higher clocks after this have any effect?
How does OCing the GPU part limit your CPU clock OCs? or is the heat not too bad ?
So many questions unanswered....
These sound like great ideas for a platform-oriented story. In fact, Thomas and I have discussed doing a piece on memory and Trinity. Maybe we could expand that to include an exploration of graphics and processor bottlenecks, too. Thanks for the feedback!
Well, in days gone by we'd have had green or gold boards. To be perfectly honest though, unless you're going to have a side window, you're not likely to care about the PCB colour. I'm far more interested in features and performance than the aesthetics, personally.
I thought that the brown PCB meshed decently with the black and grey color scheme utilized by most of the rest of the board. Hey, at least it doesn't look like those ugly low end FoxConn boards
Here is a relevant quote from a randomly-googled article:
Longtime Elder Scrolls fans hoping Skryim would take full advantage of the PC's strengths: unfortunately we have to disappoint you. Game director Todd Howard says besides higher quality textures and bigger resolutions, it "looks the same" as on consoles, and it's "mostly a DirectX 9 game in terms of how the shaders work."
He does note DirectX 11 support is a possibility down the line, however: "When it comes to DirectX 11 there are things they get us for free, like performance gains. You’re going to get performance gains out of it versus an older version. But the specifics DX11 does, like tessellation and all that kinda stuff, we aren’t taking advantage of that right now. That doesn’t mean we won’t in the future. We aren’t right now because we want to author it so it looks great.”
On the bright side, the new engine means Skyrim looks quite lovely as is, just nothing mind-blowing, which it could be. No doubt the modding community will improve the situation before long, though.
He wasn't asking for proof of what DX is utilized by Skyrim, he was asking where in the article was it claimed that Skyrim used DX11.
As far as performance goes, there doesn't appear to be any difference worth noting (which I'd expect).