| ASUS F1A75-V Pro | ASUS F1A75-M Pro | ASUS F1A75-I Deluxe | |
| Size | ATX | Micro ATX | Mini-ITX |
| Price (01/16) | $120 | $110 | $140 |
| Power Phase | 6+2 | 4+2 | 4+2 |
| Memory | 4 x DDR3 | 4 x DDR3 | 2 x DDR3 |
| PCIe |
1 x PCIe x16 1 x PCIe x4 2 x PCIe x1 3 x PCI |
1 x PCIe x16 1 x PCIe x4 1 x PCIe x1 1 x PCI |
1 x PCIe x16 |
| CrossfireX/SLI | APU + Normal CrossfireX | APU + Normal CrossfireX | APU CrossfireX |
| Audio | Realtek ALC892 | Realtek ALC892 | Realtek ALC892 |
| LAN | Realtek 8111E | Realtek 8111E | Realtek 8111E |
| SATA 6 Gbps | 7 + 1 eSATA | 6 | 4 + 1 eSATA |
| USB 3.0 | 4 + 2 | 4 + 2 | 2 + 2 |
| USB 2.0 | 2 + 8 | 2 + 8 | 4 + 2 |
Size obviously has advantages - a full size ATX board has room for
better power delivery, a broader range of PCI/PCIe options, and scope
for more controllers (e.g. SATA 6 Gbps). In the micro-ATX smaller form
factor, most of the features are still there - ALC892 audio, gigabit
Ethernet, at least 6 SATA 6 Gbps ports, 4 USB 3.0 ports, and
opportunities for up to 16 GB of memory with 4 GB DIMMs. It's only on
the mini-ITX we lose some functionality - only 4 SATA 6 Gbps on board
(plus one eSATA), room for only 8 GB of memory, and no PCI/PCIe x1
slots. But the advantage of a small board is primarily its size, for a
sleeker and slimmer system. The question then becomes whether the
F1A75-M Pro, the micro-ATX board, is worth $10 less than the ATX board
as a whole.
Visual Inspection
The black and blue livery of ASUS systems of late has been the stalwart
of their consumer level line-up, and appears again here on the F1A75-M
Pro, with a little white for the SATA ports. The wavy design with
pretty substantial fins for both the VRM and South Bridge heatsink could
be considered more style rather than substance, but due to the
motherboard supporting 100 W processors, the VRM heatsink may be
required to shift a lot of heat and it should be sufficient to cope due
to ASUS’ careful attention to detail in their design.
We also have EPU and TPU (Energy Processing Unit and Turbo Processing
Unit) chips present. These two have separate roles - to reduce the
carbon footprint of your computer with the EPU processor, and the TPU
processor is there to diagnose the system for an optimal overclock when
either the TPU switch is used or the BIOS option is enabled.
Working our way around the board, you will notice that there are four
fan connections available. The CPU fan is located above the socket, and
in the lower left half of the socket area there are two more fan
connections available - one of them is a PWM based chassis fan header
whilst the other is the PWR header which is 3-pin. The final header can
be found on the right-hand-side of the motherboard just below the 24-pin
power and it is a chassis fan which is also PWM based. Unfortunately,
you do not have option to control the two chassis fans independently in
the BIOS nor in the software.
Looking at the expansion options on this motherboard; there are two
PCIe x16 slots which run at x16/x4 when in a CrossFireX setup, resulting
in limited bandwidth of the second GPU, as detailed in our previous A75
reviews. Also on board is a PCIe x1 as well as a single PCI slot.
As SATA 6 Gbps is native on this platform, there are no SATA 3 Gbps
ports to be found. There are six ports in total and they support RAID
with the option to use RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10 or JBOD. These are all
in white on the bottom right of the board.
On the back panel of the board, from left to right, we have a combined
PS2 port, two USB 3.0 ports, a HDMI output, an optical SPDIF output, as
well as VGA and DVI-D ports for your display outputs. Further along,
there are two more USB 3.0 ports and two USB 2.0 ports with a gigabit
LAN port above. Lastly, there are the six ports for your various sound
inputs and outputs.
BIOS
As with previous ASUS A75 iterations, our BIOS today is a fully
graphical based BIOS - I found it easy to navigate around and find what
you are looking for. All of the settings are where you would expect to
find them and I feel that ASUS engineers have made this BIOS with ease
of use in mind.
The front page of the BIOS contains the basic information of the system
along with some voltage readings and temperatures. You can change the
boot order here as well by dragging the device which you would like the
board to boot from to the front of the list. The three system
performance options offer power saving (green), normal (blue), or mildly
TPU overclocked (red).
The overclocking section of the BIOS has plenty of settings for you to
play around with, including multiplier (with locked APUs only being able
to reduce the multiplier), base frequencies, memory strap and voltages
either by offset or absolute values. The OC Tuner option does the
equivalent of enabling the TPU - under Ai Overclock Tuner, we have some
predefined settings for users to enable, assuming their hardware is
capable.
Under the monitoring section, you will be able to control three of the
four fans, namely the CPU fan and two chassis fans. The fourth fan is a
power fan which is not controllable and will always run at full speed.
If you wish to update the BIOS, it is easily done with a USB stick
which is formatted to a FAT file system. I was unable to discern
noticeable changes between the 1501 BIOS which was used during the
review compared to the newest revision (at the time of writing).
If you decide to overclock your system with the automated process in
either the BIOS or the software which ASUS provide, the 'OC Tuner', I
only got an extra 3 MHz put on to the bus speed, which equates to 78 MHz
on the clock speed of the A6-3650 APU (26x100). The voltages remain at
stock and the system is stable. The RAM is automatically bumped up to
the 1866MHz strap with the correct timings and voltages set which are in
the X.M.P profile. Due to the bus being overclocked by 3 MHz, the RAM
ends up with a final speed of 1922 MHz with the same timings and 1.65
volts is applied.
When I overclocked the system manually via the BIOS, I was able to
achieve a final base clock of 141 MHz at 1.5 V, which gave an overall
clock speed of 3666.4 MHz.
As this is only a $110 motherboard, we don't get much in the box:
User manual
Two SATA 6 Gbps cables, one right angled
I/O shield
Drivers and utilities DVD
Two SATA 6 Gbps cables, one right angled
I/O shield
Drivers and utilities DVD
Considering this is the ‘Pro’ variation of this lineup and it costs
around $110, I think another couple of SATA cables in the box would have
been preferable.
Board Features
| ASUS F1A75-M Pro | |
| Size | Micro ATX |
| CPU Interface | FM1 |
| CPU Support | Desktop Llano |
| Chipset | A75 |
| Base Clock Frequency | 100 MHz by Default, 90 to 300 MHz in 1 MHz increments |
| DDR3 Memory Speed | 1333 MHz by Default, 800 MHz to 1866 MHz supported |
| Core Voltage | 0.800 V to 1.700 V in 0.0125V increaments |
| CPU Clock Multiplier | CPU Dependent, upper limit fixed unless Black Edition processors used |
| DRAM Voltage | 1.35 V to 2.30 V in 0.01 V increments |
| DRAM Command Rate | Auto, 1 or 2 |
| Memory Slots |
Four DDR3-DIMM Maximum 64 GB, Non-ECC Unbuffered 1066 MHz to 2250 MHz selectable |
| Expansion Slots |
2 x PCIe x16 (x16/x4) 1 x PCIe x1 1 x PCI |
| Onboard SATA/RAID |
6 x SATA 6 Gbps (RAID 0, 1, 10) 1 x eSATA 6 Gbps |
| Onboard |
6 x SATA 6 Gbps 4 x Fan Headers 4 x USB 2.0 header 1 x USB 3.0 header 1 x S/PDIF Out header 1 x Front Panel Connector 1 x Front Panel Audio Connector 1 x MemOK! Button |
| Onboard LAN | RealTek RTL8111E Gigabit Fast Ethernet Controller |
| Onboard Audio | Realtek ALC892 8-Ch High Definition audio CODEC |
| Power Connectors |
1 x 24-pin ATX 1 x 8-pin 12V |
| Fan Headers |
1 x CPU (4-pin) 2 x CHA (4-pin) 1 x PWR (3-pin) |
| IO Panel |
4 x USB 3.0 Ports 2 x USB 2.0 Ports 1 x PS/2 Port 1 x Gigabit Ethernet 1 x Optical SPDIF output 6 x Audio Jacks HDMI/VGA/DVI-D Video Outputs 1 x Optical SPDIF output |
| BIOS Version | 10/26/2011 |
| Warranty Period | 3 Years |
On AMD boards, there are limitations to what NICs are being used - the
Realtek NIC/Audio combo are often sold at a discount, and thus are the
main focus for these types of boards.
Software
Both the software and the driver installations were very easy - as with
some other manufacturers, it is as simple as inserting the DVD and
clicking install, unless you would prefer to pick and choose which
drivers and/or software you wish to install yourself.
The software you would find on the DVD is mainly the ASUS Suite II -
the main ASUS 'all-in-one' control software. The software includes
hardware temperature monitors, and users can make adjustments to your
system clocks from within the OS. It also allows you to update your
BIOS, as well as allowing you to make changes to your fan and power
profiles.
All the options can be changed on-the-fly, rather than having to restart the computer to go into the BIOS and alter them there.
Test Setup
| Processor |
AMD Llano A6-3650 4 Cores, 4 Threads, 2.6 GHz |
| Motherboards | ASUS F1A75-M Pro |
| Cooling | Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme |
| Memory | G.Skill RipjawsX Series 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3-1866MHz |
| Memory Settings | DDR3-1866MHz - 9-10-9-24 1T at 1.65v |
| Video Cards | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB |
| Video Drivers | 11.8 |
| Hard Drive | Micron C300 |
| Optical Drive | Samsung SH-S223Q |
| Case | Dimastech Bench Table |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate |
| SATA Testing | Micron C300 |
| USB 2/3 Testing | Patriot 64GB SuperSonic USB 3.0 |
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter
connected to the power supply, while in a dual GPU configuration. This
method allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the
board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical
PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that
consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using
this motherboard.
CPU Temperatures
With most users’ running boards on purely default BIOS settings, we are
running at default settings for the CPU temperature tests. This is, in
our outward view, an indication of how well (or how adventurous) the
vendor has their BIOS configured on automatic settings. With a certain
number of vendors not making CPU voltage, turbo voltage or LLC options
configurable to the end user, which would directly affect power
consumption and CPU temperatures at various usage levels, we find the
test appropriate for the majority of cases. This does conflict somewhat
with some vendors' methodology of providing a list of 'suggested'
settings for reviewers to use. But unless those settings being
implemented automatically for the end user, all these settings do for us
it attempt to skew the results, and thus provide an unbalanced 'out of
the box' result list to the readers who will rely on those default
settings to make a judgment. CPU Temperatures are not really indicative
of quality or performance, even though one would postulate that worse
parts may produce higher temperatures. However, if a manufacturer uses
more conductive material in the power plane, this reduces resistance and
increases the voltage at the CPU, causing a higher temperature but
potentially better stability.
USB Speed
For this benchmark, we run CrystalDiskMark to determine the ideal sequential read and write speeds for the USB port using our 64GB Patriot SuperSpeed USB 3.0 drive. Then we transfer a set size of files from the SSD to the USB drive, and monitor the time taken to transfer. The files transferred are a 1.52 GB set of 2867 files across 320 folders – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are the videos used in the Sorenson Squeeze test.
SATA Testing
We also use CrystalDiskMark for SATA port testing. The operating
system is installed on the SSD, and the sequential test is run at the 5 x
1000 MB level. This test probes the efficiency of the data delivery
system between the chipset and the drive, or in the case of additional
SATA ports provided by a third party controller, the efficiency between
the controller, the chipset and the drive.
DPC Latency
Deferred Procedure Call latency is a way in which Windows handles
interrupt servicing. In order to wait for a processor to acknowledge
the request, the system will queue all interrupt requests by priority.
Critical interrupts will be handled as soon as possible, whereas lesser
priority requests, such as audio, will be further down the line. So if
the audio device requires data, it will have to wait until the request
is processed before the buffer is filled. If the device drivers of
higher priority components in a system are poorly implemented, this can
cause delays in request scheduling and process time, resulting in an
empty audio buffer – this leads to characteristic audible pauses, pops
and clicks. Having a bigger buffer and correctly implemented system
drivers obviously helps in this regard. The DPC latency checker
measures how much time is processing DPCs from driver invocation – the
lower the value will result in better audio transfer at smaller buffer
sizes. Results are measured in microseconds and taken as the peak
latency while cycling through a series of short HD videos - under 500
microseconds usually gets the green light, but the lower the better.
3D Movement Algorithm Test
The algorithms in 3DPM employ both uniform random number generation or normal distribution random number generation, and vary in various amounts of trigonometric operations, conditional statements, generation and rejection, fused operations, etc. The benchmark runs through six algorithms for a specified number of particles and steps, and calculates the speed of each algorithm, then sums them all for a final score. This is an example of a real world situation that a computational scientist may find themselves in, rather than a pure synthetic benchmark. The benchmark is also parallel between particles simulated, and we test the single thread performance as well as the multi-threaded performance.
While the F1A75-M Pro is the top A75 in Single Thread and the bottom
A75 in Multithread for our 3DPM tests, neither results are vastly
different from the other A75 boards, as expected.
WinRAR x64 3.93 - link
With 64-bit WinRAR, we compress the set of files used in the USB speed
tests. WinRAR x64 3.93 attempts to use multithreading when possible.
The F1A75-M Pro secures top spot in our WinRAR benchmark for A75, beating the F1A75-I Deluxe by eight seconds.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.2 - link
FastStone Image Viewer is a free piece of software I have been using
for quite a few years now. It allows quick viewing of flat images, as
well as resizing, changing color depth, adding simple text or simple
filters. It also has a bulk image conversion tool, which we use here.
The software currently operates only in single-thread mode, which should
change in later versions of the software. For this test, we convert a
series of 170 files, of various resolutions, dimensions and types (of a
total size of 163MB), all to the .gif format of 640x480 dimensions.
Somehow the FastStone test gave a score which was a lot lower than the other A75 boards. This result was extremely repeatable.
Sorenson Squeeze 6.0 - link
Sorenson Squeeze is a professional video encoder, complete with a vast
array of options. For this test, we convert 32 HD videos, each a minute
long and approximately 42 MB in size, to WMV 512KBps format. Squeeze
can encode multiple videos at once, one for each thread.
On the lower powered systems, we see a wider spread of times for our
Squeeze test, depending on the background software and/or other
processes deciding to eat CPU time from a full install including vendor
software. The F1A75-M Pro performs similarly to the A75-UD4H in this
regard.
Aliens vs. Predator Benchmark
Aliens vs. Predator is a DirectX 11 science fiction first-person
shooter video game, developed by Rebellion Developments. Available as a
standalone benchmark, on default settings the benchmark uses 1920x1080
with high AF settings. Results are reported as the average frame rate
across 4 runs.
Metro2033
Metro 2033 is a challenging DX11 benchmark that challenges every system
that tries to run it at any high-end settings. Developed by 4A Games
and released in March 2010, we use the inbuilt DirectX 11 Frontline
benchmark to test the hardware at 1920x1080 with full graphical
settings. Results are given as the average frame rate from 10 runs.
Final Words
The ASUS F1A75-M Pro definitely has strong points and not-so strong
points, but overall it performs to a level which you may have expected
from a mid-range A75 motherboard. For the features which you get with
this motherboard and how it performs, it certainly is not a bad
contender in its price bracket of around $110 from Newegg.
As with most A75 boards, dual discrete graphics cards in a Llano based
system is made possible due to the fact that ASUS have included two full
length PCIe slots - however, there are two issues with this. The first
problem being the fact that users may be somewhat limited due to the
second slot being positioned right at the bottom of the board (as an
mATX motherboard would typically be in an mATX sized case, there may not
be enough room to fit a dual slot GPU). The second issue is with the
chipset being limited to providing a x16/x4 PCIe lane split. This
really limits the second slot to any x1/x4 sound or RAID cards at best.
When we tested the board's performance, in single threaded mode it was
good, but showed some inconsistencies when multi-threaded applications
were used. Even when retested to try to eliminate any issues with bad
boot ups, the scores which you see in this review remained statistically
around the same value. When this board was put through its paces with
the overclocking part of the review, it delivered some great results. It
is currently one of the best overclockable boards which we have on
record for the A75 platform, and there was most likely more performance
left in it if a user was willing to go beyond our self imposed 1.5 V
overclock limit.
With A75 (and A55) producing boards all much of the same price, with
usually the same onboard features, it comes down to the extras, the
warranty, the software, and how much a consumer likes the manufacturer.
ASUS have always done well in most of these areas - perhaps at this
level we would have liked a couple more SATA cables, but the three year
warranty and AI Suite software/fan controls are top notch.
