Reviews - MSI A88XM-E35

[HEXUS]

Value and performance go hand-in-hand.

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[abychristy]

This is the time I am seeing

"The Bad

None of note"

[heXuser]

Asus<-Gigabyte<-MSI<-AsRock<-ETC. Price wise its the exact opposite.

[Uchiha]

the isn't as good as the i5 bit price to performance ratio, i think it's better to go with the apu

[PewPew]

Apu is just not worth it, you can still get same performance with fm3+ or 1550 based systems for same price but with better upgrade capabilities

[3s-gtech]

As a current MSI AMD mobo owner; I can swear by the solidity and value even if mine is an ancient 785G AM2+ model. Will note this for future budget builds.

[Agume]

The only that worries me is the ram slots.Its only two.

[DanceswithUnix]

Interesting, though I wouldn't want to run an overclock on that tiny VRM.

[stoatwblr]

My thoughts?

Ditch the PS2 ports, replace the VGA port with a DVI-I (or ditch VGA entirely)

(How many VGA-only monitors are actually left in circulation? Ditto PS2 keyboards/mice?)

Ditch the PCI port entirely. Nothing of consequence in a budget system will use it, whereas a PCIe x1 may be of some merit. It'd be far better to concentrate on adding an extra set of USB3 ports.

I'd say allow for 32Gb and 2133MHz ram but that's already done

Apart from that, the only other issue is the value of Kevari APUs. As rightly pointed out the latest A10 processors are overpriced and draw too much power compared with the equivalent Intel part - and you can build a FM3+ system with better specs for the same money.

Even if you move away from the "halo" APUs, the lower cost devices are still outgunned by the same price Intel components. I like supporting AMD but they're not giving much ground for most budget buyers.

Rationale:

Budget systems tend to have _long_ operational lives compared with higher end systems and whilst they tend to ship with nothing plugged into the expansion slots, those slots will be used down the road to extend the system life a bit further. Who will be using PCI in 4 years' time?

As an example: our "budget" (business) systems in $orkplace average 7 years between updates, but we do buy them maxxed out on ram.

Thinking about what's still going to be useful to the customer in 4-5 years is worthwhile and builds customer loyalty. Making it hard to support for longer periods will affect fleet buys (I'd be purchasing 100-200 machines at a time and these kinds of things enter into the calculations)