Asus F2A55-M review

The F2A55-M is the first motherboard we’ve seen with AMD’s new FM2 socket. This socket is required for the second-generation AMD “Trinity” A-series processors, which replace the “Llano” chips we saw last year.

This MicroATX board has the low-end AMD A55 chipset, which has certain limitations compared to the higher-spec A75 and A85X. Chief among these are the lack of native support for USB3 or SATAIII. Asus has got around the USB3 limitation with a third-party ASMedia controller, so you still get two USB3 ports on the rear of the motherboard alongside four USB2. There are no USB3 headers, though, so you won’t be able to connect up the USB3 front panel ports in some PC cases.

The lack of SATAIII is more of a problem. Although SATAII is quick enough for all mechanical hard disks, you need SATAIII to take full advantage of the quickest SSDs. For example, a Corsair Performance Series Pro SSD can write large files at 406MB/s when connected to SATAIII, but this drops to 298MB/s over SATAII.

If you’re going to stick to mechanical hard disks or cheaper SSDs, such as Crucial’s made-for-SATAII V4 SSD, you’ll be fine with the F2A55-M’s six SATAII ports. You also get four memory slots for up to 64GB of DDR3 RAM. As it’s a MicroATX motherboard there was never going to be that much room for expansion, but you do get a PCI slot and a PCI Express x1 slot, as well as two PCI Express x16 slots. The PCI Express x1 slot will be blocked if you fit a graphics card, however.

AMD’s A-series processors have powerful built-in graphics chipsets, and the motherboard has VGA, DVI and HDMI outputs to take advantage of this. You can use all three ports to run three monitors at once. The HDMI port is limited to a resolution of 1,920×1,080 and the VGA plug maxes out at 1,920×1,600, but you can use the dual-link DVI port to run high-resolution screens at up to 2,560×1,600. The rear panel is well-equipped for sound, with six analogue outputs for up to 7.1 surround and an optical S/PDIF output for amplifiers without HDMI inputs.

Once we fitted an AMD A10-5800K processor and 4GB of 1600MHz DDR3 memory, we saw an overall score of 72 in our benchmarks. This ties in with the preliminary results we’ve seen from a motherboard with the top-of-the-range A85X chipset, so the cheaper chipset doesn’t seem to impact performance. We also used the OC Tuner in the BIOS to overclock the system automatically. This led to the processor boosting up to 4.3GHz instead of its stock 3.8GHz, and took our benchmarks up to an overall score of 77. The processor fan was pretty noisy at this speed, however.

We’ve covered graphics performance in our review of the AMD A10-5800K processor already, and we had no problems fitting an AMD Radeon HD 6570 to the board to run in CrossFire mode, which led to a significant boost in 3D performance.

Asus’s F2A55-M has a good specification for its size, and the addition of USB3 helps to overcome one of the limitations of the A55 chipset. However, we wouldn’t like to live without SATAIII, and we’re beginning to see ATX Socket FM2 boards with both USB3 and SATAIII built in start to appear for only around £20 more than Asus’s board. Despite this, as a good basis for a MicroATX PC with some gaming performance, the F2A55-M is a budget buy.