MSI MOTHERBOARD A88XM-E35 V2

In our recent FM2+ motherboard reviews [1,2], one of the common themes has been the ability of the motherboard power delivery to cope with temperature. When the power delivery is too hot, the system may cease to function or various benchmarks fail. Over-engineering the power delivery to be efficient has benefits, but increases the cost of the product. When I pulled the A88XM-E35 out of the box and saw no heatsink present,

I was worried that the same issue would rear its head, and it did. Without additional VRM cooling, the A88XM-E35 caused an instant reboot on some of our more strenuous benchmarks (Agisoft, Handbrake). Therefore it should be noted that the results of this review were taken with an additional fan on the VRM cooling, and users of the A88XM-E35 should bare this in mind.

With that aside, the A88XM-E35 sits as a $68 FM2+ motherboard with two DRAM slots, a PCIe x16, x1 and PCI slot, six SATA 6 Gbps ports, HDMI output and support for four USB 3.0 connectors. The Ethernet and audio codec are made by Realtek, and the board has three fan headers, two of which are 4-pin. Even at $68 there is some styling, with the PCB in black and single color slots except for the PCIe 3.0 x16.

• OC Genie 4: Overclock in 1 Second
• Click BIOS 4: Easily Fine-tune Your System
• 3 Display Outputs: HDMI/DVI/D-Sub Support
• Super Charger: fast charge iPad/iPhone/smartphone