Gigabyte F2A88X-UP4 Review: Ticks most boxes expected from a mid-range motherboard

AMD announced a platform refresh with its Kaveri APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) with A10-7850K being the flagship model. Unlike the previous platform refreshes - Richland and Trinity - AMD has added some interesting functionality with the latest APU which we will look at in the review today. The Kaveri APU will require the FM2+ socket boards, as it is not compatible with the older FM2 socket thanks to two additional pins on the Kaveri APUs. Gigabyte’s F2A88X-UP4 is one of the first socket FM2+ boards we had a chance to test. So let us find out if the new platform is worth investing in.   Board Layout and Design The Gigabyte F2A88X-UP4 is a well-designed board. The black and grey colour scheme with red accents on the heat-sinks positions this board in the mid to high-end segment. Although since it is an AMD board meant for the Richland and Kaveri APUs, calling this a high-end board is a bit of a stretch. Having said that, the F2A88X does impress us in terms of the layout. The first thing that catches your eye is the heat-sink design. The heat-sinks around the voltage regulator module (VRM) are sturdy and well designed. The one on the A88X chipset is more flatter in profile and is connected to the VRM heatsink via a heat-pipe. There is ample clearance around the APU socket, specially when you put on the stock APU cooler. [caption id=“attachment_220476” align=“aligncenter” width=“600”] Gigabyte F2A88X-UP4 is a well-designed board and a pleasing overall layout[/caption]   Going clockwise from the CPU socket, you have the four RAM slots where each dual-channel is of a different colour. It has three buttons onboard - a large red-coloured power button located just beside the RAM slot towards the corner, along with the smaller Reset and clear CMOS buttons located on either side of it. We found the location of the reset and clear CMOS buttons just behind the RAM slots to be a bit uncomfortable, especially on our open test bench with the I/O panel facing us.   As you go down from the power port, you come across the 24-pin ATX power connector followed by six SATA 6 Gbps ports, all pointing outwards. You also have one SATA port that points upwards, but thankfully it is located on the bottom corner, in a way that it does not block lengthier graphics cards. The two-digit POST error LED read out is located beside the chipset. Between the POST error LED and the SATA ports, you have the two 64 Mbit UEFI BIOS chips. There are four USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports on the board as well.   Rounding off the slots are three PCIe x16 ports with the top-most slot in the x16 configuration followed by the other two in the x8 and x4 configurations respectively. Three PCIe x1 and a single PCI slot are also present. The PCIe x16 slots are located at respectable distances and you can crossfire two cards comfortably in the first two slots. You also get three ‘system fan’ ports in all.   Features The Gigabyte F2A88X-UP4 is a board featuring the FM2+ socket, which has two additional pins. This means that the Kaveri APUs will need the latest socket FM2+ boards, but the older Richland and Trinity APUs are compatible with the FM2+ socket. Kaveri APUs however, are not backwards compatible. It supports up to 64GB DDR3 memory. The A88X chipset codenamed Hudson D4, supports 4x USB 3.0 ports, 10x USB 2.0 ports and 8x SATA ports, natively. [caption id=“attachment_220469” align=“aligncenter” width=“460”] The backpanel IO of the Gigabyte F2A88X-UP4 has most of the connectors you expect from a board of this calibre[/caption]   Kaveri APUs can be crossfired with AMD Radeon R7-250 and R7-240 cards. Just as we had seen with the Richland and Llano APUs, only a limited number of AMD graphics cards can be CrossFire’d with the integrated graphics on the APU. We find this decision a bit limiting, considering the APU is in its third generation. With high-end cards, there won’t be much help, but mid-range cards can use some help from the integrated graphics on the APU. AMD should not put a limit on the cards that can be CrossFire’d with the APU.   On the I/O back panel, you have all the major ports expected of a mid-range motherboard. Four USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, 1 eSATA connector, LAN port, 7.1 channel audio support and so on. On the display front you have the D-sub port, DVI port, an HDMI port and a DisplayPort. The HDMI and DisplayPort can support upto 4K resolutions (4096x2160).   The UEFI BIOS is quite easy to navigate, although the mouse has a definite lag. It puts up the main settings up front on the first MIT tab itself. You can adjust frequencies, memory settings, voltage settings and so on. The Extreme Memory Profile has only one preset which puts the memory setting at 1866MHz. The APU supports memory settings up to 2400MHz. Overclocking using the BIOS is easy under the frequency settings.

  Gigabyte has also bundled its standard set of utilities such as Easy Tune 6 for overclocking, @BIOS for updating the BIOS from the OS environment, along with others such as LAN optimiser, On/Off charge and so on. Unlike the Intel Z87 platform where we had seen a uniformity and common design element of the Gigabyte utilities, on the AMD board, each utility still has a distinct look.   AMD A10-7850K - the Kaveri APU AMD A10-7850K is the latest APU from AMD codenamed Kaveri and it comprises four Steamroller CPU cores bundled with eight Radeon cores (Radeon R7),  both of which share the unified 4MB L2 cache. It is based on a 28nm manufacturing process and unlike the 32nm Richland APU, Kaveri APU supports heterogeneous system architecture (HSA), where the CPU and GPU share memory to work on some tasks together. The main advantage of this is that tasks can take advantage of both the serial and parallel processing prowess of the APU using the same memory pool for both CPU and GPU cores. [caption id=“attachment_220471” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] AMD A10-7850K is the flagship APU from the Kaveri line up[/caption]   The A10-7850K packs in a whopping 2.41 billion transistors as compared to 1.3 billion seen on the Richland APU. The A10-7850K is clocked at 3.7 GHz with a boost clock of 4 GHz. The GPU cores are clocked at 720MHz. The Radeon R7 Spectre GPU is based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. It comprises 512 shader cores within 8 GPU cores.   It supports DirectX 11.2 and Mantle, the low-level AMD API which gives game developers improved access to PC hardware and streamlines communication between the CPU and GPU. The Kaveri APUs also enable hardware decoding of H.264 and VC-1 video codec standards. It also supports the upcoming H.265/hevc codecs as well which will help in decoding UltraHD content. Apart from this all Kaveri APUs will come with AMD TrueAudio that was introduced with the Hawaii cards. There is a dedicated digital signal processor for improved audio, dynamic 3D sound processing and so on.   Test Setup Processor: AMD A10-7850K, AMD A10-6800K, Intel Core i7-4770K Motherboards: Gigabyte F2A88X-UP4 (AMD), ASRock Z87 Extreme4 (Intel), Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H (Intel), ASUS Maximus Impact (Intel) RAM: 2x 4GB GSkill Ripjaws @ 1866MHz Cooler: Stock AMD cooler, stock Intel cooler PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Monitor: BenQ GL2250   Performance The Gigabyte board we received was on the older BIOS (F2) and using the Kaveri APU proved helpless as we could not get the system to work. So we had to use the Richland APU - AMD A10-6800K to update the BIOS to F5c which then enabled the use of the AMD A10-7850K APU with the board. Before making your purchase, be sure to check with  board makers if the BIOS has been updated to accommodate the Kaveri APUs or not, as not everyone may have a spare Richland APU to update the BIOS.   We ran our regular suite of tests, which is a mixture of synthetic and real life tests. The results are as seen in the charts below. We could overclock the APU to 4 GHz via the BIOS. The EasyTune 6 utility also allows you to overclock and it has three presets.       We use three real-world testing scenarios, to check how well the processor performs with regular tasks. In the 7-zip file compression test, we compress a 100MB assorted file folder using a 4-character encryption. In the POV-ray test we render a 800x600 pixel scene with 0.3 anti-aliasing. Finally, in the video encoding test, we convert a 1 min MPEG file to x.264 MPEG-4 using AVIDemux. All these tests are timed and the lower the score, the better the processor.       Since the main USP of the board is its integrated graphics, we decided to test a variety of games on this. We tested the games on three different memory settings, to give you an idea of how it boosts the gaming performance. The integrated graphics on the AMD A10-7850K is Radeon R7 Spectre, on the AMD A10-6800K is Radeon HD 8670D and on the Intel Core i7-4770K is Intel HD 4600.       Verdict and Price in India AMD APUs have always been interesting in the sense that they tend to push the integrated graphics envelope higher. The AMD A10-7850K does not disappoint on the gaming performance and other graphics-intensive tasks. It also played back Blu-ray movies without any issue. But when it comes to compute prowess, AMD Kaveri does not really bring any major improvement over the Richland APUs. Having said that, the compute performance is decent, but is not comparable to similarly priced Intel processors. Compute has never been AMD’s strong point vis-à-vis Intel, and if you think that the new Steamroller CPU cores would have brought about a change, that isn’t the case.   Gigabyte has a very good board here which ticks all the boxes that one would expect from a board of this calibre. We just wished there was an on-board wireless module to complete the feature set. Build quality is good and there is ample clearance space around the APU socket. The pricing of Rs 12,300 for this board is decent considering it packs in most features. Considering the AMD A10-7850K APU costs in the region of Rs 11,500 (US dollar conversion), that works out to around Rs 24,000 for the platform excluding other components. If you are looking at a mid-range system which will also allow you to comfortably game using just integrated graphics, then this platform makes sense. But if you are going to buy a mid-range or a high end graphics card anyway, thereby rendering the integrated graphics useless, then opt for an Intel platform as that will take care of both your compute as well as gaming needs.