It’s pointless spending more than £100 on a Socket FM2 motherboard when budget LGA1150 motherboards can be had for half the price for around £250, an equivalent Intel CPU, motherboard and discrete graphics card will walk all over an AMD A10-6800K.
Keep your choice of FM2 motherboard within sensible fiscal limits, though, and you can shave £100 off that price and still end up with a decent gaming system.
That’s where Gigabyte’s micro-ATX GA-F2A88XMD3H comes in. At just £53, adding an A10-6800K will mean your entire CPU, GPU and motherboard setup will cost around £150.
It also sports AMD’s A88X chipset, making it one of the cheapest motherboards to do so, and it will support AMD’s Kaveri APUs, slated for release in early 2014, too. However, cheap doesn’t always mean cheerful, so let’s take a closer look.
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The PCB sports the familiar brown colour of a budget motherboard, and the chipset heatsink is the only cooling system in sight.
Meanwhile, the layout isn’t bad but it isn’t amazing either, with both the USB header and CPU fan headers located some way from the edge of the PCB.
The CPU socket is also quite close to the DIMM slots, and none of the SATA ports is mounted parallel to the PCB. At this price, though, we can forgive these issues; there’s nothing majorly adrift after all.
Thankfully, there are no shortcomings with storage options, with the GA-F2A88XM-D3H offering eight SATA 6Gbps ports, all controlled by the A88X chipset.
It also has all bases covered as far as expansion goes, offering two 16x PCI-E slots running with 16 lanes and four lanes respectively, plus a further 1x PCI-E slot and a standard PCI slot – a decent collection for a budget micro-ATX board.
Fan headers are pretty sparse, though, with just two offered in addition to the CPU fan header. Not surprisingly, there’s little by way of overclocking features, with just a clear-CMOS jumper and a dual BIOS to aid you.
Meanwhile, the USB ports on the back panel aren’t exactly in abundance, with just two USB 3 ports and four USB 2 ports – the total of six is the bare minimum needed to deal with a modern PC’s requirements.
There’s also a dual-link DVI port supporting resolutions of up to 2,560 x 1,600, and the HDMI port will actually offer 4K support but only in conjunction with AMDs forthcoming APUs – not its current line-up.
Unlike the G1 Sniper A88X we reviewed recently, there are no extra audio features either, with just a standard 8-channel Realtek ALC887 on-board sound card.
PERFORMANCE
In our Media Benchmarks, the GA-F2A88XM-D3H proved to be a little slower than the G1 Sniper A88X, especially in the video encoding and multi-tasking tests. Its scores of 2,012 and 980 respectively compared negatively to the G1 Sniper A88X’s scores of 2,120 and 1.066 at stock speed, while the overall scores were 1,423 for the G1 Sniper A88X and 1,353 for the GA-F2A88XM-D3H.
Using the A10-6800K’s on-board GPU, our game tests also showed a slight disadvantage, with the G1 Sniper A88X holding a 3fps minimum frame rate advantage in Left 4 Dead 2 and a 1fps advantage in Skyrim – equivalent to 8 per cent.
Overclocking our APU proved to be a little tricky, as we were first hampered by the inability to set a specific CPU voltage, instead having to add voltage in steps to eventually arrive at our usual 1.475V. This was no different with the G1 Sniper A88X, though, and it just takes a little longer than the usual method.
This is where our test CPU is stable at 4.7GHz and, amazingly, the GA-F2A88XM-D3H was quite happy with this 600MHz clock speed boost. Sadly, it couldn’t hit 4.8GHz like the G1 Sniper A88X, but it also matched the latter’s GPU overclock, boosting the clock speed from 844MHz to 1,050MHz.
This saw the overall score in the Media Benchmarks rise to 1,577 – just 44 points short of the G1 Sniper A88X, while the Left 4 Dead 2 minimum increased from 48fps to 54fps, matching the more expensive motherboard.
The same was true in Skyrim, with the GA-F2A88XM-D3H again matching the G1 Sniper A88X’s minimum overclocked frame rate of 18fps. As AMD’s APUs see decent gaming performance benefits from using faster memory, we added some 2,133MHz Corsair Dominator memory to the system.
However, we had to manually input the memory timings first to get the system stable, with the board returning overclock errors when we tried running the memory at its rated frequency.
Once we’d done that, the minimum frame rates increased again, to 20fps in Skyrim and 58fps in Left 4 Dead 2 – just behind the G1 Sniper A88X – only a little tweaking in the settings would be needed to make Skyrim playable at 1080p. Its SATA 6Gbps speeds were good too, boasting read and write speeds of 545MB/sec and 501MB/sec respectively, while stock and overclocked power consumption were 39W and 75W respectively at idle, and 143W and 198W under load.
CONCLUSION
Apart from a couple of niggles, such as mediocre stock-speed performance and having to manually input RAM timings, there’s little to dislike about the GA-F2A88XM-D3H . It’s easy to overclock and there are no major issues with the layout or features. If you can put up with its little issues, you can save £30 compared to Gigabyte’s G1 Sniper A88X. The latter is a better board, but the GA-F2A88XM-D3H is exactly what you want from an AMD APU motherboard – it’s cheap without compromising on overclocking. With support for AMD’s forthcoming APUs too, we have no hesitation about recommending it.
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Specs
IN DETAIL
Chipset AMD A88X
CPU support FM2/FM2+ A-series APU
Memory support 4 slots: max 64GB DDR3 (up to 2,133MHz)
Expansion slots Two 16x PCI-E 3 (one at 16x; one at 4x), one 1x PCI-E 2 slot, one PCI slot
Sound Realtek ALC887 8-channel
Networking 1 x Realtek Gigabit LAN
Overclocking Base clock 100–140MHz; CPU Multiplier 8-79x; max GPU frequency 2,000MHz; max voltages: CPU +0.3V, RAM 1.9V
Ports 8 x SATA 6Gbps, 8 x USB 2 (A88X), 4 x USB 3 (A88X) 1 x LAN, 4 x surround audio out, line in, mic, optical S/PDIF out, HDMI, VGA, DVI
Dimensions (mm) 244 x 244
