The A68N-5200 board, by incorporating one A6-5200 Kabini-based APU, is bringing to the table even more raw performance when compared to its A4-5000, while the GPU component gets a 100Mhz boost. While the increased 3D performance is minimal versus the A4, other tasks which require CPU performance will get up to 25% performance boost. Despite the fact that this is a cheap and low-powered board, BIOSTAR saw fit to include a fully-fledged UEFI interface which also contains some performance tuning options. Last but not least, we do get with the A68N-5200 one very-welcome PCI-E 2.0 x16 (x4 electrical) which invites us to install a dedicated video card.

Speaking of the dedicated video card, we were really curious to see the performance improvement after we have installed a low-end HIS R6 360 video card versus the integrated solution. Several games were brought in for testing and here we could remember of Tomb Raider, Resident Evil 6, Dirt 3, Grid 2, Hitman Absolution and Sniper Elite III. While most of titles were unplayable even at 1280x1024 with the Radeon HD 8400 integrated solution, the dedicated video card has improved the solution even more than we would have imagined and this can be seen from the following table:

To sum it up, if you are going to buy this board, make sure you also save a bit for a low-end to mainstream video card solution, because the 3D performance will be greatly improved and will transform the platform which was initially good for light to medium browsing, office and playing really old games to a system which can even make a good impression when running titles from more recent years, while playing carefully with the resolution.

A68N-5200 board can be snatched online for about $69, which is a good value for the overall package.

BIOSTAR A68N-5200 Motherboard is Recommended For:

We would like to thank again to BIOSTAR for making this review possible!