The Board - A Closer Look

Built with a Winbond BIOS soldered into place, the ECS A85F2-A Golden might need to be RMAed should you manage to corrupt the BIOS. But I pushed the board as far as I could without any issues, so I doubt you would come across such a problem. Monitoring duties are provided by a Fintek Super I/O, while the clock generation is managed by an ICS clockgen I found near the PCIe slots.


The VRM of the ECS A85F2-A Golden is driven by a Richtek 4+2 part, although only 3 phases of the CPU portion are filled. ECS claims that it is capable of 140W or so, which is a good 40% greater than the stock A10-5800K's TDP. The DIMM VRM is a single analog phase, although it appears to be fairly beefy. The board supports up to 64 GB.


The VRM and FCH coolers are large, thick chunks of anodized metal that match the board's theme of golden capacitors and chokes all over the place. Both are more than enough to do the job, but the FCH cooler got fairly warm to the touch.


Input/output duties are managed by a series of controllers. Asmedia provides a USB 3.0 controller for the additional ports found on the rear backplate, while Realtek provides a TRL8111E LAN controller for networking. Audio is provided by a VIA CODEC, which is not a brand we see often at all. It will be interesting to see how it performs, since I am so used to seeing Creative or Realtek audio CODECs.