Gigabyte F2A88XN-WIFI Motherboard Review

Gigabytes’ now relatively old motherboard for the FM2 socket is with us mostly so we can review AMD’s A10-7850k and 7700k APU’s – but we thought we would give the board we were testing them on the once over while we were at it! This board is incredibly feature rich for its size, but as a compromise, has a have strange layout that only an It board like this could get away with…
Lots start with what’s in the box. Two disks you will never need, warranty info and a user manual, two sata cables, a padded rear io shield, the Bluetooth/wifi antenna and of course the board itself. That isn’t a bad accessory pack for a small board like this.

To cover the board in detail, you have the FM2 socket at the centre, with some fairly heavy duty power phases on the side – and that full size 16x PCI-E slot. You’ll also find an mSATA add in wifi module – which happens to be an Intel AC module.. Strange, but cool. The 4 6GB/s sata ports sit at the top, and are surrounded by the front panel connectors (usb2, usb3, power and reset etc) and the 24 pin power connector. The 4 pin CPU power connector sits and the bottom left of the board next to the PCI-E slot, making this a very weird board to cable manage (and build slightly).

The rear I/O is comprised of 4 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports, a PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard combo port, 2 HDMI ports, 2 threaded antenna connectors, a DVI-D port, Gigabit LAN and 5.1 audio and SPDIF connectors.This is a pretty awesome feature set, as this board is great for HTPC/Console replacement use, and having two HDMI connectors, along side the built in AC wifi, make this on killer buy!

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The chips we are testing with this board, as I mentioned above, are the A10-7850k and A10-7700k, and as you can see, they are incredibly easy to install. Just pull the arm up, line up the gold triangle and drop it in – then throw the arm down and you’re done! We will be using the stock cooler on these chips (for now..) to make sure anyone going for the fully budget approach can be safe in the knowledge that the chips (and board) can handle the workload of light/medium gaming!

Overall, I really like the board. It’s feature rich, although a b***h to cable manage – but that is the price you pay. The two RAM dimms are enough for 16GB (if you go for 2x 8GB sticks), or like we did, with 2x 4GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR3.

 

So. If you are in the market for a small HTPC or light gaming rig (console replacement), you should probably give this board a look, as it is a great backbone for  systems like that!