A purely practical, more sensibly
priced Trinity
Our first taste of AMD's new Trinity
platform came in the shape of the Asus F2A85-V Pro. Sapphire must hope we're
sticking to the playground rule of metrics though, making this second one the
best, and whatever ASRock board is sitting in the wings the one with the hairy
chest.
There are the standard four DIMM slots
supporting DDRB up to 1,600MHz at standard settings and faster speeds via
overclocking, five PCIe slots of varying speeds, four display outputs, seven
SATA 6Gbps ports, a smattering of USB 3.0 ports and a dual BIOS setup, which is
accessible via a two-way switch on the board.
Also sitting between the two PCIe 2.0 slots
is a mini PCIe slot, which can be used to house an mSATA SSD drive. However,
while it's fine with a single graphics card in place, with a second card in the
lower slot it may be a bit tight.
Four play
The Trinity platform supports up to four HD
displays, so it's no surprise to find all four port types on the rear I/O
panel. Triple view is supported by using the VGA and DVI ports with either HDMI
or DisplayPort. There’s also that pair of PCIe 2.0 slots.
The primary slot runs at full xl6 speed
with a single card installed; however dropping a second card into the other
slot in a CrossFire setup drops the speed of both slots down to x8 speed. You
also get a pair of XL PCIe ports, which sit between the two larger slots, while
an x4 slot sits above them. And if you have any old PCI cards to use, the board
also comes with a pair of standard PCI slots.
Under a modest passive heatsink are the
components for the 6+2 power design. The heatsink is low enough in profile that
it shouldn't get in the way of most third-party CPU coolers. The A85XT
(Hudson-D4 FCH) chipset is also passively cooled, with a modestly sized
heatsink.
On the bottom edge of the board are the
CMOS reset, reset and power buttons. On the Pure Platinum A85XT these are
joined by the two-way switch for the dual BIOS.
Performance-wise, the Sapphire board keeps
close company with the Asus. In fact it delivers a little extra in the standard
CPU tests, and seems to have an edge in the memory bandwidth test. The main
comparison with an IvB i3, using its top-end HD 4000 graphics, works out pretty
favourably for AMD.
The bandwidth of the high-end Asus
Sabertooth is huge, but doesn't help push the i3 ahead of the quad-core
Piledriver APU in the CPU tests.
Compared with the pricier Asus board, the
$160 price tag makes more sense. Trinity won't be used as the base for a
high-end rig, so such feature-packed motherboards aren't vital, but having a
solid board like this Sapphire mobo will help get the most out of your APU
chip.
Technical analysis
We used a retail boxed version of AMD's
latest A10-5800K CPU with the standard cooler. It stood up to the challenge,
but if you want to push the A10-5800K as far as it will go, a third-party
cooler is a must.
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Vital statistics
§ Price: $168
§ Manufacturer: Sapphire
§ Web: www.sapphiretech.com
§ Socket: AMD FM2
§ Chipset: AMD A85XT
§ Memory: 4x DDR3 DIMM slots
(uptol,600MHz+)
§ I/O: 7x SATA6Gbps, Bx USB 3.0
§ Expansion: 1x mini PCIe, 1x PCIe 2.0 x 16, 1x PCIe
2.0 x8
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