MSI Unveils Mini-ITX Socket FM2 Motherboard A85IA-E53

MSI's second most interesting socket FM2 motherboard is the A85IA-E53, perhaps the first socket FM2 motherboard in the mini-ITX form-factor. Although its name says otherwise, it is based on the previous-generation A75 chipset, which is no big deal, there's no room for eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports from the A85 FCH, anyway, and you still end up with four 6 Gb/s ports. In the limited board space, MSI was able to cram in a 5-phase VRM to power the APU, a power design consisting of 24-pin + 4-pin power inputs, two full-size DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 16 GB of dual-channel DDR3-1866 MHz memory, a lone PCI-Express 2.0 x16 expansion card slot, display outs that include HDMI and D-Sub, 802.11 b/g/n, and Bluetooth.