ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 Pro Reviews

ASRock mainboards based on Intel Z77 Express and designed for LGA 1155 processors are excellent. They can successfully compete against the products from other mainboard manufacturers. They have definitely outperformed their competition in quite a few aspects, and they are working really hard to continue improving. However, unfortunately, the same doesn’t apply to ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 mainboard. And this isn’t because the board is not so good at all or has a lot of shortcomings. No, this isn’t the fact, its technical specifications are the same as by the previously reviewed Asus F2A85-V PRO and Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4. Moreover, ASRock mainboard can boast a number of unique advantages, which its competitors do not have. However, there are still a few areas that could use some improvement and we are going to point out below what they are.

When it comes to FM2, ASRock provides a pretty good feature set, a pretty good BIOS, and decent performance. Other than that, there's not really a lot to say here. As a high-end product for a value platform, it hits the mark and then some. One of the biggest things for me is the addition of ASRock's "XFast 555" suite of software, which features "XFast RAM". Getting such functionality is, thanks to AMD's Radeon RamDisk software, possible should you buy an AMD Socket FM2 product from a brand other than ASRock. Buying AMD'S freeware version of Ram Disk will net you the ability to choose up to 4GB for most memory and 6GB for AMD-branded memory manufactured by Patriot. The full version of the software will allow for up to 64 GB, which is the maximum you can install into an FM2 system, but you'll have to shell out $18.99 USD. Such limitations don't exist with ASRock since "XFast RAM" is free. That means ASRock supports every feature of the AMD FM2 platform without a single compromise. When it comes to overclocking, every setting you need is there, so much so that the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 currently holds second place for raw frequency records according to HWBOT, and that's pretty respectable.

The ASRock FM2A85X is a good motherboard for the new “Trinity” CPUs from AMD. Its highlights include the presence of three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots, four different video connectors (HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI-D, and VGA), seven SATA-600 ports, one eSATA-600 port, six USB 3.0 ports, a very decent voltage regulator circuit, a myriad of overclocking options, and an outstanding audio codec (Realtek ALC898), which provides very high signal-to-noise ratios (110 dB for the outputs and 104 dB for the inputs), i.e., unnoticeable background noise.