Just a glance across a crowded room. A glimpse of its mSATA
port. A flash of dual-HDMI. We’ve fancied this mini-ITX ASRock board right from
the get go.
Mini-ITX
boards for AMD Kaveri
For starters,
when it comes to AMD Kaveri-based rigs, we tend towards the tiny. Building a
value small form-factor rig is a big part of the APU appeal. So, two points to
Gryffindor for the mini-ITX form-factor.
Next up, SATA
support. Board space is at a premium, obviously, but ASRock has still managed
to squeeze in six SATA ports. You could argue that you’re not going to be
hooking up huge numbers of SATA devices to such a tiny board, but it’s far
better to have the option, and it gives this Mobo desktop credibility.
At the other
end of the storage scale, we’re equally pleased to see an mSATA slot. In other
words, the ASRock FM2A88X-ITX+ has all your storage bases covered. You can have
a battery of SSDs in a big box, or slimline mSATA storage in a slinky chassis.
The rear
panel looks good, too. There’s optical S/PDIF, multi-port audio, a couple of USB
3.0 sockets and, critically, a pair of HDMI ports to go with the dual-link DVI output
and VGA connectivity. DisplayPort is notably absent, which puts a slight limit
on desktop appeal, but in small form-factor and home-theatre terms, HDMI is the
important interface.
For
users who don't have an optical disk drive to install the drivers
from our support CD, Easy Driver Installer is a handy tool
Integrated
wireless networking adds to the appeal. It’s N-spec rather than AC, which
effects range and interference more than performance numbers. Unless you have
pretty exceptional networking requirements, N is probably fine.
So, the
feature set looks damn fine. What about the performance? At stock clocks,
there’s not a huge amount of variation between any of these boards, but the ASRock
is one of the deviants, both for better and worse.
Hit and
miss
On the
downside, SATA performance is a bit patchy. It’s tricky to know why, but we
can’t help noting that the only other board to put in poor SATA numbers was the
other ASRock effort, the FM2A88X+ Killer. Clearly ASRock has cocked something
up with its SATA implementation. there’s no denying that the sequential write
throughput of below 300mb/s looks ugly when the competition is all well above
400mb/s. You probably won’t feel that day-to-day since 4K random access
performance is fine, but it’s a bit off-putting.
On the other
hand, the FM2A88X-ITX+ CPU core overclock of 4.4 GHz is second only to the
full-ATX ASUS A88X-Pro, and that’s something you will notice. It also passes
our integrated GPU overclocking test, with the required 1,020MHz graphics core
and 2,400MHz memory frequencies. Okay, the average frame rate of 60 is a little
off the pace, but minimums are arguably more important and 49fps is a good
result by that metric.
PCI
Express 3.0 can maximize the bandwidth of the
next-gen PCI Express 3.0 VGA cards, thus providing ultimate graphics
performance.
The FM2A88X-ITX+
makes for an awfully appealing mini-ITX package. It ticks a lot of our
most-desired spec boxes, and the overclocking is surprisingly good for a mini-ITX
board. Okay, the SATA performance is a bit wonky and it looks pricey next to
something like Gigabyte’s F2A88XM-DS2, but we’d take it home for the night. Get
your coat, love. You’ve pulled.
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Specifications:
·
CPU:
Athlon/A-Series (FM2+) ·
Chipset: AMD
A88X (Bolton D4) ·
Maximum memory
supported: 32GB ·
Storage devices:
6 x SATA 6Gb/s ·
Rear Panel
Ports: PS/2, HDMI, USB 1.0, USB 3.0, eSATA, S/PDIF
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