Asus B85M-G review

MicroATX motherboards are great for building smaller PCs and they’re often a lot cheaper than full-sized ATX boards, at the expense of some features and ports. Even so, there’s general enough expansion for most people, as the Asus B85M-G shows.

You get a total of four USB3 connectors, with two at the rear of the motherboard and two at mid-board for connecting to the front panels of your case. A further four USB ports are at the rear with another four at mid-board.

There are also four SATA3 connectors on the board, although only one of them faces upwards with the other three off to the side. If your microATX case is very compact without much clearance on the right of the motherboard, this may be a problem if you have more than one SSD. Otherwise, it shouldn’t be a major issue.

A single PCI-E x16 slot can be found on the front of the board, enough for a single graphics card. If you install anything but the thinnest of graphics cards, you’ll find one of the two PCI-E x1 slots below the x16 slot will be obstructed. The second and lower slot should be fine, so any smaller expansion cards such as wireless cards will still fit nicely. There’s another problem with installing a graphics card: if you want to remove it later, accessing the lever that allows you to remove it is difficult because it’s located in a small gap between the RAM slots. We needed a screwdriver in order to poke the lever out of the way when removing the graphics card.

Four memory slots are provided for a maximum of 32GB of DDR3 RAM, although, despite the colouring of the slots, you should place your RAM sticks in consecutive rather than alternate slots; doing the latter will result in your computer failing to boot or running in single-channel mode. There are no lights on the board to let you know there are any issues, which is a feature we find comforting and also very useful for troubleshooting RAM and PSUs.

If you’re not installing a graphics card, there are VGA, DVI and HDMI outputs. The DVI and VGA ports can support Full HD resolutions at 60Hz while the HDMI port can manage 4,096×2,160 pixels at a jerky 24Hz or 2,560×1,600 at 60Hz.

Performance with our benchmark hardware on board was inline with our expectations, scoring 101 overall. There are no automatic overclocking options that you’d find on more expensive boards; just “optimal” settings in the friendly, albeit basic UEFI BIOS.

The Asus B85M-G is a competent and basic microATX motherboard. If you need more ports and overclocking options, go for the Asus Z97-E instead, but for simple builds this is a great choice.