For most manufacturers the ITX platform is a serious dilemma when it comes to what features should be included and what kind of market to target. Depending on the platform, it would be easy to assume that its more cost-effective to go with mainstream and budget chipsets rather than high-end but considering the rather high-standards of those that build ITX solutions, it’s more complicated than that. For the most part, most motherboard manufacturers all have ITX solutions but none more so varied than that of ASUS and GIGABYTE. For this review we will be looking at GIGABYTE’s A85X motherboard in the ITX form factor packing the FM2 socket for AMD APUs. We’ll check-out how the board handles the new AMD A10-6800K Richland APU and see how it stacks up.
GIGABYTE has been with us for quite a while providing a lot of motherboards for review and again we’re back with another board, this time around for ITX crowd. GIGABYTE has been very active developing all sorts of boards for the currently released 8-series for the Intel platform and now we have some new socket FM2 series boards. On our test bench is the GIGABYTE F2A85XN-WIFI ITX motherboard, designed for people who want to opt for and APU solution whilst still having the flexibility of supporting a full x16 PCI-E slot for a dedicated GPU and a built-in WIFI/BT card for connectivity options. Let’s see a bit of spec first before moving on.