14 DAY TRIAL // ASRock has taken to launching a new motherboard every other week or so, many of them designed with support for AMD processors, but this time there are two motherboards to cover.
The company really likes black. Just like the last Extreme 11, the FM2A85X Extreme4 and FM2A85X Extreme4-M have dark PCBs (printed circuit boards).
The former is, as one might guess from the name, the larger one. The M in the second board's name stands for micro-ATX.
FM2A85X Extreme4 is equipped with the FM2 socket, thanks to the A85 chipset. Said socket is powered by a 6-phase VRM and is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, which means 32 GB with 8GB modules.
Three legacy PCI slots exist, since there are still plenty of video and network cards that don't need a PCI Express slots.
Not that PCIe slots don't exist of course. There are two of them: a PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot and a PCI Express 2.0 x4 slot.
As for storage, the mainboard gets seven SATA 6.0 Gbps ports and an eSATA output. No SATA II here (SATA 3.0 Gbps).
The smaller motherboard, FM2A85X Extreme4-M, has a single legacy PCI slot, but the same pair of PCI Express slots: one x16 and one x4.
Just like on the larger model, the former is wired to the APU (helps with CrossFire setups), while the latter is wired to the FCH (Fusion Controller Hub, or the Southbridge).
Everything else is mostly the same, including the video ports: DVI, D-Sub and HDMI are all present and accounted for, as are Gigabit Ethernet and 8-channel audio.
All in all, the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme4 and FM2A85X Extreme4-M motherboards are decent enough, but do not try to overwhelm prospective customers with too many features that only enthusiasts/overclockers ever use. The price range is of $90-$110 / 90-110 Euro.
