ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 for AMD Socket FM2 APUs Review 31

ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 for AMD Socket FM2 APUs Review

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Value & Conclusion

  • The ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 is available for $89.99.
  • VRM and BIOS ready to overclock.
  • Inclusion of XFast 555 Software gives the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 a leg above the rest.
  • Good audio rendering
  • Full-ATX Expansion capabilities
  • Simple color scheme that can easily match other components well.
  • Fully functional AMI UEFI BIOS that includes mouse support and support for 3 TB+ drives.
  • Overclock designs on APU platform lead to limited performance gains.
  • Auto overclocking profiles and XMP settings interfere with manual adjustments.
  • No SLI support.
When it comes to FM2, ASRock provides a pretty good feature set, a pretty good BIOS, and decent performance. Other than that, there's not really a lot to say here. As a high-end product for a value platform, it hits the mark and then some.
One of the biggest things for me is the addition of ASRock's "XFast 555" suite of software, which features "XFast RAM". Getting such functionality is, thanks to AMD's Radeon RamDisk software, possible should you buy an AMD Socket FM2 product from a brand other than ASRock. Buying AMD'S freeware version of Ram Disk will net you the ability to choose up to 4GB for most memory and 6GB for AMD-branded memory manufactured by Patriot. The full version of the software will allow for up to 64 GB, which is the maximum you can install into an FM2 system, but you'll have to shell out $18.99 USD. Such limitations don't exist with ASRock since "XFast RAM" is free. That means ASRock supports every feature of the AMD FM2 platform without a single compromise.
When it comes to overclocking, every setting you need is there, so much so that the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 currently holds second place for raw frequency records according to HWBOT, and that's pretty respectable.

So whether you want to push to the absolute limit, or just build an affordable FM2 machine, the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 has what it takes, but do you? ASRock's FM2 OC competition ends in a few days...
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Apr 24th, 2024 20:12 EDT change timezone

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