Asus A88X-Gamer Unboxing and Overview
Asus recently announced the budget friendly gaming motherboards and one of them is the Asus A88X-Gamer a AMD compatible board. For the CPU it supports AMD Socket FM2+ Athlon™/A- Series Processors that Supports CPU up to 4 cores and Supports AMD® Turbo Core 3.0 Technology. The motherboard has a red and black accent similar with the Asus branding color. It’s an ATX Form Factor with a dimension of 12″ x 9″ or 30.5cm x 22.9cm.
First Glance on the Motherboard noticeable is the blade look heatsinks which are very attractive. quite long for a motherboard since it has a massive expansion slots, first is a 1x PCI Express x16 3.0 but also compatible with 2.0 and another PCIe x16 that is just 2.0 compatible that can be used for Multi-graphic cards. It also comes with two PCIe x1 slot and a three PCI legacy slots.
Integrated with AMD Radeon™ R/HD8000/HD7000 Series Graphics in the A-Series APU also has Multi-VGA output support (HDMI/DVI/RGB ports) the HDMI Supports with max. resolution 4096 x 2160 @ 24 Hz (4k)/ 1920 x 1200 @ 60 Hz while the DVI with max. resolution 2560 x 1600 @ 60 Hz and the RGB supports with max. resolution 1920 x 1600 @ 60 Hz.
The pins are all located at the bottom of the Expansion slots which are the Audio 10–1 Pin (AAFP), COM 10–1 Pin, TPM 20–1 Pin, 3x USB inline 10–1 pin (USB56, USB78 AND USB910), Clear RTC RAM (2-pin CLRTC) and the System Panel Connector (20–8 pin).
It also can hold upto 8 SATA 6GB’s connection that is located on the right side of the expansion slots. this is one of my favorite feature since this can also have RAID connection (Support Raid 0, 1, 5, 10, JBOD) for a better storage handling.
The large box near the SATA connection is the AMD A88X Chipset (Bolton D4)
It also supports DDR3 Memory Modules upto 64GB max (4 x DIMM, Max. 64GB, DDR3 2400(O.C.)/2250(O.C.)/2200(O.C.)/2133/1866/1600/1333 MHz Non-ECC, Un-buffered Memory )
In the same location near the Memory Module located also is the ATX power connections (24-pin EATXPWR and 8-pin ATX12V). Plus the USB 3.0 connector that has 20–1 pin (USB_34).
Asus A88X-Gamer is also integrated with one of the Asus technology the Supreme FX
SupremeFX 8-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC
- Supports : Jack-detection, Multi-streaming, Front Panel Jack-retasking
- High quality 115 dB SNR stereo playback output
Audio Feature
- SupremeFX Shielding™ Technology
- ELNA premium audio capacitors
- Optical S/PDIF out port(s) at back panel
- Audio amplifier: Provides the highest-quality sound for headphone and speakers
- EMI protection cover to prevent electrical noise to affect the amplifier quality
The back panel IO are as follows, 1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse combo port(s), 1 x DVI, x D-Sub, 1 x HDMI, 1 x LAN (RJ45) port(s), 2 x USB 3.0 (blue) , 4 x USB 2.0 , 1 x Optical S/PDIF out , 6 x Audio jack(s). I really like that they included the SPDIF connection so it’s easy to install Dolby channel speakers.
Included also in the box is the 2x SATA Connector , User Manual and Back IO Plate.
The Asus A88X-Gamer is officially priced in the Philippines for only Php5,490 and has a 3-Years warranty from Asus which is really a big plus.
