ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 for AMD Socket FM2 APUs

[newtekie1]

Most Z77 products do, although you have to manually input the frequency. Even then, some boards offer more granularity than they can actually provide...like you set 100.1 MHz, and you get 100.3 MHz. Set 100.3 MHz, you get 100.5 MHz.


It's really dependant on BIOS, and some board makers have better BIOS programmers than others. Really, after doing so many reviews...that is the one thing I have learned...BIOS, and who makes it, is really what sets board makers apart from one another. ASRock makes a damn good BIOS, both on Intel and AMD platforms, while some other brands do well on Intel, but horrible on AMD.

Interesting, I never really paid attention with Z77 since adjusting the FSB isn't really done. Good info.

 

[cadaveca]

Interesting, I never really paid attention with Z77 since adjusting the FSB isn't really done. Good info.

That's part of the reason I like AMD's offerings right now, even if they aren't the fastest. As someone who like playing with settings, AMD just offers so much more flexibility, and a good price, too.

You can BCLK tweak a bit on Z77, 103 MHz is no problem on every board I have tried, but going over that, well, not all boards can do it, without disabling absolutely everything. If it doesn't run 24/7, and you lose significant functionality, I'm not interested.

 

[eidairaman1]

Oscillators voltages and current aren't always exact hence +/- margins

 

[Killer_Rubber_Ducky]

The board does not have PCIe 3.0. It is PCIe 2.0

 

[eidairaman1]

The board does not have PCIe 3.0. It is PCIe 2.0

and who was this for?

 

[newtekie1]

That's part of the reason I like AMD's offerings right now, even if they aren't the fastest. As someone who like playing with settings, AMD just offers so much more flexibility, and a good price, too.

You can BCLK tweak a bit on Z77, 103 MHz is no problem on every board I have tried, but going over that, well, not all boards can do it, without disabling absolutely everything. If it doesn't run 24/7, and you lose significant functionality, I'm not interested.

I'm in total agreement with you there. I'm definitely a tinkerer, and I'm even more of a fan of taking something inexpensive and pushing it to the level of the much more expensive part. That is why I've switch to almost exclusively building AMD rigs. The performance might be behind Intel's top end, but in the mid range they offer a great price to performance ratio and have the added benefit of actually allowing me to push the performance higher.

To give an example, a lot of people like to pit the FX-4300 against the i3-3220 as a basic entry level gaming processors, and most of the time I see people saying the i3 is the winner. But rarely anyone mentions the fact that the FX-4300 can be overclocked and the i3-3220 can't. Yes, as you said, you can push the BCLK to 103, but that really amounts to nothing in relative clock speed. So even with a slight overclock the FX-4300 takes the win easily.

Plus, the AMD motherboard tend to offer more value for the money as well. You can get a down right great feature packed 970 based board for $70, with 5-6 SATA 6.0Gbps ports and RAID and crossfire support. You just can't do that on the Intel side.

 

[cadaveca]

The board does not have PCIe 3.0. It is PCIe 2.0

Actually, the top two slots are PCIe 3.0 complaint in design. The Board would support PCIe 3.0 fine...but the APU that has the PCIe controller, does not. IF AMD decided to release a PCIe 3.0 FM2 APU, it would work fine in this board, and is no different than many Intel SKT1155 boards, in that regard. I did change the spec sheet though, just to shut you up.