The Board - Layout

The ECS A85F2-A Golden is built around the same design ethics as the Z77H2-AX Golden Board I reviewed many months ago, with a flashy gold and black color scheme from top to bottom. The back of the board features a standard silver blackplate and the socket itself is white, but the board is, otherwise, a mad mix of circuitry surrounded by gold.


The socket area is pretty clear should you want to try extreme cooling, with a quartet of DIMM slots close by. Each supports DIMMs of up to 16 GB in density. That brings total memory support to 64 GB, which is more than most users are going to need; however, you can add on AMD's Radeon RAMDisk, so some might install that much memory.


There are seven available expansion slots: a triplet of PCIe x1 slots, dual PCIe x16 slots, and two PCI slots. The dual PCIe x16 slots share the single x16 link from the APU, so they take up a x8/x8 configuration when both are populated, or the upper slot has a full x16 connection when the lower slot is empty. There are only three fan headers: the CPU fan header at the top is a four-pin PWM-based header, while the other two are located on the board's bottom edge and are of the 3-pin variety.


Speaking of the board's bottom edge, it's fairly basic, with standard front panel audio and USB 2.0 ports and those aforementioned fan headers. There are also a serial COM port and Clear_CMOS jumper. The actual front-panel button header is on the far right, just above the board's edge.


The backplate is mostly taken up by video outputs. VGA, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort all make a showing. Other connectivity on the backplate consists of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0, a LAN port, and the audio connectors. There is also a single eSATA port that is driven by the AMD A85X FCH. The remaining seven ports are found on the board's right edge: six are connected to 90-degree ports and the seventh sticks straight out of the board behind the SATA 2/3 ports. AMD's APUs support lots of drives and lots of ram, more than their 990FX counterparts. It's an odd mix, I must say.