Asus has expanded its lineup of FM2 Motherboards with the F2A85-V.
Asus has expanded its FM2 based motherboard lineup with the F2A85-V which omits some of features found on the F2A85-PRO in order to arrive at the mid-range price point of $100. Specifically the F2A85-V has simpler heatsinks, no heatsink pipe connecting the VRMs to the FCH heatsink, less APU power phases and a reduced expansion slot layout. Though the latter is less than ideal for multi-GPU configurations, this is unlikely to pose a problem since most users are unlikely to be using a multi-GPU setup on a Trinity based system.
Aside from this, the board is very well equipped given its price point and comes comes packed with 6-phase VRM that takes gives the APU life through power from the 4 pin EPS plug and has support for upto 64 GB of DDR3-1866 RAM via four DDR3 ports. Additionally, it features a single PCIe x16 slot, a single PCIe x4 slot shaped like an x16 slot, two PCIe x1 slots, three classic PCI slots and dual-link DVI, VGA and HDMI display connectors. Rounding up the featureset are four USB 3.0 ports, two on the rear I/O and two on the front panel header, a generous seven SATA3 ports onboard, rear I/O eSATA3 and 7.1 HD audio with an optical TOSLINK output.
99.9% of people using FM2 would not need a second PCI-E 16X slot, if you want to go multi-crossfire then you should go with AM3+ or an Intel chipset. FM2 is for APUs with built-in graphics, and maybe if you want a boost.. an additional discrete graphics. These boards are for budget systems.
flyflinger"...price point of $100."mmmmm..... so why is newegg selling this thing at $119~???
Maybe Newegg decided that they wanted to sell it for $120 instead of the $100 MSRP.
greghomereally really bad SATA output layouts though
Unless you're doing discrete x discrete Crossfire/SLI in the APU system (in which case you are probably fail), the second PCIe x16 slot probably won't have a large, dual-slot card and it's unlikely for many of us to use the PCI slots. Although not ideal, "really really bad" seems like an exaggeration, all things considered.
