It’s a micro-ATX board based on the AMD A58 chipset, and it supports socket FM2+, which goes all the way up to the A10 4.1GHz processor. There are a pair of dual-channel DDR3 DIMM slots for up to 1866MHz, 32GB system memory and three PCI expansion slots of PCIe 3.0 x16, PCIe 2.0 xl and standard PCI.
The board also features six SATA-2 3 Gbps connectors, gigabit Ethernet, six USB 2.0 ports and a welcomed VGA,
DVI and HDMI port. As with most boards these days, the more expensive range’s features have trickled down to the lower end of the budget scale. This of course means that we can now enjoy a more stable platform with advanced surge protection, lightning protection (not by holding it over your head in the middle of a storm), ESD guards for the IAN and USB ports and moisture protection through the new glass fabric design.
There’s also an all solid capacitor design, support of 2K and 4K resolutions – provided you’re using an AMD FM2+ APU – and triple monitor support from the rear 10 ports without the need to install an additional graphics card. We even liked the UEFI BIOS.
Although this is a more expensive motherboard than the previous Asus AMD offering, it’s far more useful across a range of desktop scenarios than the AMI platform. Granted, the FM2 family of CPUs are more power hungry than their younger brethren, but they do give you a lot more performance that can be used for every aspect of PC use.
For a media centre PC, this board will shine, as it would for normal desktop duties.
Even without an external graphics solution, the GPU on the likes of the A10-7850K Pro (Radeon R7) is capable of handling all but the most demanding of games.
We’ll even stretch our necks out as far as saying in this case you’re probably better off investing in this board than the equivalent Intel selection or AMD’s more recent socket releases Pound for pound, you’ll end up with a far more useful system for considerably less, and there’s better scope for expansion and improvement.
A nice touch on this board is the inclusion of the standard PCI slot, which is something that has been missing from the other boards we’ve so far tested. This will certainly make legacy expansion card users happier and give them a much needed performance boost and upgrade for relatively very little.
Overall, we were quite pleased with the ASRock FM2A58M-HD+. It has everything you could ask for from a budget motherboard, and the added extras improve its uses even further.