Review: Asus Vanguard B85

Conclusion

...but the £70 Vanguard, solid in every respect, is an interesting choice for those willing to spend £20 more than the rock-bottom motherboards

Looking towards the cheaper end of Intel's consumer pricing spectrum, the B85 chipset and dual-core (Haswell-based) Pentium and Core CPUs are a good fit for anyone contemplating a modern PC that, whilst perfectly competent, doesn't break the bank.

Asus has seen promise in the B85 chipset - which is a stripped-down version of the Z87 - and launched a premium board around it. Such a move seems counter intuitive on first glance, as the purpose of B85 is to offer a value option, but the £70 Vanguard, solid in every respect, is an interesting choice for those willing to spend £20 more than the rock-bottom motherboards.

The longer warranty, above-average BIOS, and good fan control makes us think this could well be a microATX board suited to powering a no-frills workhorse PC.

The Good

Longer warranty, excellent build quality
B85-beating features
Good BIOS, fan control

The Bad

No overclocking potential

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Asus Vanguard B85

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The reviewed motherboard is available to purchase from Scan Computers.

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At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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Hang on….you can get a Z87 from ASRock or MSI, both having good reviews for ~£70 from Scan….

I don't understand its price point.

Are things shrinking ?

I suppose the argument might be that some people will prefer the better quality power stages etc that (presumably) are standard across the TUF range (although the VRM heatsinks look very weedy compared to the ones on my sabertooth 990 albeit FX is much more power hungry).

Its a shame hexus didn't try some old school FSB overclocking on this board - assuming thats even possible on modern intel chips?

herulach
Its a shame hexus didn't try some old school FSB overclocking on this board - assuming thats even possible on modern intel chips?

Not really - you can increase the BLK by a few percent only on non ‘K’ intel processors, that's it…

Whats the point of this motherboard though?? The heatsinks would make sense if you are overclocking but you cannot overclock with the motherboard,and Intel made sure the overclocking loophole was removed anyway.