On-Board Peripherals
Contents
The AMD A85X chipset is a single-chip solution. This chip supports eight SATA-600 ports with RAID (0, 1, 10, and 5). All SATA ports are located at the motherboard’s edge, and six of them are rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them. See Figure 4.
Figure 4: SATA-600 ports
The AMD A85X chipset supports two USB 1.1 ports, 10 USB 2.0 ports, and four USB 3.0 ports. The MSI FM2-A85XA-GD65 offers 10 USB 2.0 ports, four soldered on the rear panel and six available through three headers located on the motherboard; and four USB 3.0 ports, two located on the motherboard rear panel and two available on a header located on the motherboard.
The MSI FM2-A85XA-GD65 doesn’t have FireWire ports.
This motherboard supports 7.1+2 audio format, i.e., eight channels plus two independent channels for audio streaming. On this motherboard, the audio is generated by the chipset using the Realtek ALC892 codec, which is a mainstream-grade product, providing a 97 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog outputs, 90 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs, and up to 192 kHz sampling rate for both inputs and outputs, with 24-bit resolution. These specifications are good for the average user, but if you want to work professionally with audio editing or converting analog audio sources into digital format, you will need to pick a motherboard with at least 100 dB signal-to-noise ratio for its inputs.
The motherboard has on-board optical SPDIF output. Differently from most motherboards, the FM2-A85XA-GD65 doesn’t have an SPDIF header for you to install a coaxial SPDIF output or to route digital audio to older video cards that require this physical connection in order to have digital audio output in their HDMI connectors.
The analog audio outputs are independent, so you won’t need to “kill” the “mic in” or the “line in” jacks when using a 5.1 or 7.1 analog speaker set.
The portrayed motherboard has one Gigabit Ethernet port controlled by a Realtek RTL8111E chip.
In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel with a shared PS/2 keyboard/mouse connector, four USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet port, VGA output, DVI-D output, HDMI output, DisplayPort output, optical SPDIF output, two USB 3.0 ports, and the analog audio jacks.
Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel