ECS Elitegroup A85F2-A GOLDEN (V1.0) Pro Reviews

Gold is nice, but gold needs to be great. For ~$127 as currently listed, the ECS doesn't match up to the competition with respect to usability, features, and memory capability on our sample. In order to succeed in the channel/end-user markets, ECS need to take their Black Series and Golden range of products and create a whole brand around them, like ASUS have with the ROG, ASRock with the Fatal1ty, Gigabyte with the G1, or even MSI with the Big Bang.

ECS has quite a few "high-end" products now, and they definitely offer something different. When I look at them, I get the same feeling as when looking at a little baby playing with some blocks, all cute and innocent. Each has something that it will do better than the one next to it, and every once in a while, you get one that does it all. Unfortunately, the ECS A85F2-A Golden only does one thing really well and that's clocking the CPU portion of my APU. That's not to say that everything else it does is bad, as that's far from the truth, but I expected a bit more. It's the same with babies; sure, they are cute now, but they can be a lot of work too. I guess the stock performance should have really given me a hint of how overclocking would work, since I noticed that the CPU speed was higher than with other tested products, with everything else being on the good side of pretty average. ECS has never truly been at the forefront of overclocking either, so what I found was actually rather impressive, since I managed to boot and run some benchmarks at 4900 MHz on the CPU part of my APU. However, any overclocking to other parts of the APU was rather underwhelming considering I couldn't even add 5 MHz to iGPU speed.

When AMD rolled out the A85X chipset, it really made it clear that this was a product that could stretch the bounds of more than one user segment. The Trinity platform has proved to be the most versatile and upgradeable platform on the market stretching into the 'enthusiast on a budget' and so far having my hands on four of the boards from this group, they have been spot on in the effort. It seems that ECS Elite Group has really put the effort into attracting the latter mentioned market by taking a $125 motherboard and giving it the royal golden treatment starting with retail packaging more befitting a $300 motherboard, and the gold contacts and accents to match. Lest you think that all the bling is all show and no go, think again. ECS has equipped the A85F2-A Golden with all Japanese solid capacitors and Hyper alloy chokes for CPU capability up to 140W. ECS also touts support for 2600MHz overclocked RAM and a 50 °C burn in test making it ready and aimed at gamers. The M.I.B.X. or Motherboard Intelligent BIOS X is referred to as a 'friendly' BIOS and that translate into a bit simpler than some of the other A85X BIOS on the market, but that does not mean lacking. The Golden's BIOS gets the job done, it just does not have all the bells and whistles it could or the additional adjustments found with a board equipped with digital power. I for one was very surprised when It produced not only a high overclock both of the CPU and the IGP of the current Trinity flagship A10-5800K, but with an analog power delivery and without the benefit of any kind of LLC or load line calibration/control.The A85F2-A traded blows with the other high end names in the testing done here and handled it like a champ with no heat problems or glitches.

The ECS A85F2-A Golden is a good mainstream motherboard for the new socket FM2 processors, presenting two additional USB 3.0 ports in comparison with competing products that only carry the basic features provided by the A85X chipset. One of the highlights of this motherboard is the use of a top-of-the-line audio codec, which is not usually seen on motherboards targeted to the mainstream market. Competing products are positioned in the same price range; however, they don’t have the two additional USB 3.0 ports and have a lower-grade audio codec. If you want to save USD 20, you can pick the ECS A85F2-A Deluxe, which is exactly the same motherboard but with a different color.