GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4 Motherboard

Looking at the board the first thing we notice is the look. Being a more lower / mid-range board we expected the baby blue color scheme on it. When we pulled it out of the box, though, we found ourselves pleasantly surprised with the matte black theme. This helps make for a really great looking board with some grey highlights being seen throughout.

Looking at the expansion slot side of things we've got three PCIe x16 slots which run at x16 / x8 / x4 - including the new AMD A85X chipset means that CrossFire is supported. Along with that we've got three PCIe x1 slots and an older legacy PCI slot.

We've got our typical line up of headers including Audio, COM, TPM, four USB 2.0, front panel header and also a single SATA II port down here.

Turning the corner we can see the debug reader on the left side and next to that we can see two BIOS chips. Looking at the SATA side of things you can see we've got six SATA III ports which all run off the AMD A85X chipset.

Heading to the top half of the board you can see four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to up to 64GB of DDR3 at speeds of up to 1866MHz DDR. Below that you can see the front panel USB 3.0 header, main 24-pin ATX power connector, a little blue reset switch, a larger power switch and CMOS switch button in the upper corner.

Towards the back of the board in a fairly standard position you can see the 8-pin CPU power connector. We can see that the socket area is fairly clean. We've got a heatsink in the top part of the board, but apart from that, there's really not much else to report.

Finishing up our look at the F2A85X-UP4 we get over to the I/O side of things which sees a combo PS/2 port alongside four USB 3.0 ports and two USB 2.0 ports. On the video side of things we've got VGA, DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort connectivity. Audio comes in the form of a single optical out and six auxiliary ports which run off the Realtek ALC892 Codec. Finally we've also got an eSATA III port and Gigabit LAN which runs of the Realtek chipset.