Gigabyte F2A88XN-WIFI Mini-ITX Motherboard
Final Thoughts and Score:
To say that I am impressed with this little wunderkind would be an understatement. It has fully reset my expectation of small form factor computing. Obviously, I cant tell you how reliable this hardware is in the long haul, but I can tell you that out of the box experience in my eyes says a lot about the reliability of a product and how well thought out and engineered the product is. And this board works exceptionally well, right out of the gate. From watching HD movie content, to generalized computing, this board handled it all stably and with poise. This can be the basis for a HTPC or kitchen computer, or it has the flexibility to be augmented into a portable gaming system, LAN party rig. As someone who has been hefting mid/full towers all my life to LAN parties, this now has a LOT of appeal to me! The color choices on this board, I am very thankful for. Gigabyte used to have some very colorful boards. Thankfully, it appears they have grown past that. This is a good looking board that could easily justify a windowed case. I applaud Gigabyte on this board, as it has MUCH to offer computer modders by allowing such stability and flexibility in such a small size, bravo!
PRO – CONS
PROS
+Exceptional value
+Good RTM installation routines on the driver disk
+Apps stable
+Integrated Bluetooth allows for more wireless flexibility
+Out of Box experience perfect, everything worked as it should!
CONS
– No place for a mSATA
Now, if only I could get the BCLK above 106 and still use my HDDs. D:
Seriously, would be nice if they could figure a way around that. I can use USB drives just fine, but that’s…less than ideal. Setting the SATA mode to IDE doesn’t help, unfortunately, and there doesn’t appear to be any other way around it except to reduce the BCLK.
Still, I’m able to get a solid overclock with BCLK set to 106 and Core multi set at 40, but I could push my A10-6800k and this RAM a lot further if I was able to increase the BCLK more (I was able to get it stable in Memtest86 at 111, with RAM multi at 16 and timings of 9-9-9-22; essentially running DDR3-1777, if that were a thing. And the core multi was still fairly high). It’s a good board, but the A88X chipset unfortunately gimps it. :/
In case anyone’s wondering, the reason I don’t increase my memory multi above 16 is because my RAM doesn’t support it. In fact, it outright rejects 18.66 (the next higher multi) with the core multi and bclk at it’s lowest setting, regardless of voltage, and even with timings set as loose as they’ll go; refuses to even go into the firmware interface. Being only a 1600Mhz certified stick, 8GB capacity, I’m not really surprised. It serves it’s purpose, anyway.