Asus F1A75-V Pro

Asus' F1A75-V Pro matches Asrock'due south on price at $130, though information technology's not the almost expensive board the company offers. Its cheapest A75 board costs $95 while the F1A75-V Evo leaps to $140. While it may non be Asus' flagship, the F1A75-V Pro is a worthy competitor with six USB 3.0 ports, 8 SATA ports and dual PCI Express x16 slots.

Again, go on in mind that the AMD A75 FCH provides six SATA 6Gb/s ports supporting RAID0, one, 10 equally well as four USB 3.0 ports and ten USB two.0 ports. The chipset tin also handle four PCIe 2.0 x1 slots while the remaining lanes are provided past the APU. The additional ii SATA ports are once again powered past the ASMedia ASM1061 controller.

Asus features ane of the ASMedia SATA ports onboard while the other is located on the I/O console. This is a similar implementation to what we saw on the previous page, but nosotros prefer Asrock's implementation as it provides greater flexibility. With the A75 Extreme6, users can choose if they want to use the rear eSATA port and that seems handy.

Like Asrock, Asus has included the ASMedia ASM1042 for two extra USB 3.0 ports on the board'southward I/O panel, bringing the F1A75-Five Pro's USB 3.0 count to four. The remaining ii ports are meant to exist used on the front panel. Asus has also used the same Realtek RTL8111E network controller and ALC892 audio codec as found on the A75 Extreme6.

However, Asus has omitted the Extreme6's VIA Fire VT6315 PCI Express 1.one x1 IEEE 1394a controller and there are also less PCI Express lanes available. Asus opted for dual PCIe 2.0 x16 slots with a pair of x1 slots. Asrock's pattern seems more logical as it's all the same possible to utilise the x1 and x4 slots when using Crossfire or SLI applied science with dual slot cards. We should also mention that Asus doesn't list SLI support as a feature of the F1A75-5 Pro.

Whereas the A75 Extreme6 featured Asrock'south Advanced V8+ii power phase blueprint, the F1A75-V Pro has received a Digital 6+two power stage design backed by the Asus DIGI+ VRM, which combines the TPU (TurboV Processing Unit of measurement) and EPU (Energy Processing Unit). How these features really compare is anyone's judge but we wanted to run across how well they stack up when information technology comes time to overclock them, and that'southward coming later in this roundup.

All told, the I/O panel is populated with a legacy PS/2 port, one dual link DVI, DisplayPort, VGA and HDMI output, an eSATA connector, two USB ii.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 6 sound jacks and an optical S/PDIF port.