The new mainboard features a cool black PCB and some overclocking features

Oct 2, 2012 09:41 GMT  ·  By

Well-known motherboard manufacturer, Taiwanese company Gigabyte has just launched its most powerful AMD FM2 motherboard implementation to date. The new motherboard is a departure from Gigabyte’s classic blue PCB color and it is now painted in cool and gloomy black theme.

The official name of the new board is Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4 and it is based on AMD’s A85X chipset.

Gigabyte’s new Trinity motherboard has quite an impressive list of specifications and we’ll start with the 64GB memory support that’s double than what most FM2 mainboards have.

The supported DDR3 memory can have a maximum frequency of 1866 MHz while overclocking will let us use it at more than 2400 MHz along with implementing AMD’s Memory Profile (AMP).

This is an Ultra Durable 5 motherboard and thus it comes with IR3550 PowIRstage ICs from International Rectifier, 2X Copper PCB and high current Ferrite Core Chokes rated up to 60A. These features will deliver cooler temperatures than traditional motherboards.

GA-F2A85X-UP4 features three PCI-Express Gen2 x16 slots that come with 3-way CrossFire support in a x8 + x8 + x4 configuration.

A nice addition is Lucid’s Virtu MVP support for switchable graphics and this will allow the user to cut the power consumption of the system by not using the discrete video card when that’s not needed and only using the iGPU inside the AMD APU.

There are a classic VGA port along with a DVI-D connector, an HDMI one and a DisplayPort on the backside I/O panel and these will offer the user triple-display support although we believe that four displays could also be set up.

HD Audio and Gigabit LAN are taken care of by Realtek while SATA 3 support spans across 7 onboard ports and a useful eSATA port on the I/O panel.

There are two USB 3.0 ports on the I/O panel and two more are available through a header on the mainboard along with two USB 2.0 ports on the panel and 8 more coming from the PCB headers.

Gigabyte uses an Etron EJ168 chip to provide two more USB 3.0 ports on the I/O panel and, being an overclocking-oriented product, the GA-F2A85X-UP4 also comes with one Power button, one Reset button along with a CLR CMOS button.

No information on pricing has been made available yet.