ASUS F1A75-M Pro -F1 Socket – A75 – SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 – mATX AMD (Hudson D3) Micro ATX DDR3 1800 AMD – FM1 Motherboards
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- AMD A-& E2- series Accelerated Processor with AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series Graphics, Up to 4 CPU cores, FM1 Package
- AMD A75 FCH(Hudson D3)
- DIGI+ VRM- New Era of Digital Power Design that fully enables Superior System Stability, High Power Efficiency and Improved Performance Scaling
- EPU – System Level Energy Saving & Real-time Power Management for Superb Platform Power Efficiency
- TPU – Increase Platform Performance Instantly with Self Optimized Settings while retaining Full System Stability
- 1 x HDMI, 1 x DVI-D, 1 x D-Sub
- 2.2TB or higher native HD support, and Quick Boot features
- AI Suite II- Overclocking Features Easily Accessible Via a User-Friendly Interface
- UEFI BIOS- BIOS control via a Graphical Interface with mouse controlled support featuring unparalleled control options
ASUS F1A75-M PRO features the AMD A75 FCH chipset and supports the latest FMI socket AMD A-& E2- series Accelerated Processor up to 4 cores with integrated AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series Graphics to support Microsoft DirectX 11.
ASRock desktop motherboard
ASUS F1A75-M Pro -F1 Socket – A75 – SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 – mATX AMD (Hudson D3) Micro ATX DDR3 1800 AMD – FM1 Motherboards
List Price: $ 120.00
Price:
High quality part, especially for the price!,
I’ve been building computers for years, and my yearly practice of upgrading my cousin’s computer has become a thing of tradition. His last video card decided to fry itself prematurely, and concurrently destroyed the motherboard, so the current iteration of his gaming rig had to be done on a budget and at a moment sooner than anticipated. In a frantic search across the web, I came across the AMD APU processors and this motherboard. Seeing as how it could solve two problems with one stone at a price that was reasonable, I pulled the trigger to order one of these bad boys, and if it wasn’t up to our standards we would be able to crossfire an HD 6000 series card… I can happily say that this has the best integrated graphics of any computer I have ever used to date.
First impressions: this motherboard was beautiful. Well crafted, engineered, and labeled. Nothing was left to guessing. This was a huge upgrade from the previous Intel, Gigabyte, and MSI boards we had used on his computers in the past. I promptly began to reconstruct his rig, everything went together smoothly. For this build we used an AMD A8-3850 processor and 8 GB of Kingston HyperX 1600Mhz RAM.
Upon first startup, I was surprised to see that the traditional BIOS I had become so familiar with in computers from the past was no longer present, it is instead replaced by a mouse controlled GUI, but this was a welcome addition. Certainly after over 20 years they would be able to make BIOS systems more consumer friendly, and ASUS has finally accomplished this, it makes this motherboard truly feel like a piece of technology from the 21st century. Inside the menus were easy setup options that range from the simplest things like energy saving settings to advanced features like RAM voltage and overclocking abilities. These multipliers allow you to ramp up the performance of the computer at the user’s own risk, but for this application I chose to use the default settings since we didn’t have any advanced cooling solutions installed. The new GUI is actually fun to use, it’s not that I am not familiar with how to set things using the older BIOS interface, it’s just that having a mouse made it so much faster and easier to make changes and in menus that were much more intuitive.
Every hardware upgrade is not without its faults though, and that is where the problems came in. Swapping parts from a 32-bit XP windows OS, I expected some problems when changing the motherboard and processor, just as I have in the past. I was able to force start the OS during bootup, but windows refused to recognize the new hardware (or the added RAM because it was not 64-bit). After a bit of backup work to save old files, I proceeded to reformat XP onto the hard drive so it could recognize the hardware as a fresh install. This did not work out well, the motherboard didn’t want to recognize XP either upon restarting. After forcing it to start the OS on the hard drive, I quickly decided that we should probably stop putting off the inevitable and install a 64-bit windows. Following much deliberation, we picked up a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate and began the install (by the way, Windows 7 is also EXTREMELY well thought out and intuitive and actually keeps your old files in a safe place on the hard drive when you reformat, don’t worry about backing up your files like you had to with other OS changes in the past). After restarting, everything was much better, the extra RAM was utilized and the motherboard no longer refused to start up the hard drive with the OS installed. Moral of the story, this motherboard doesn’t seem to play well with older versions of Windows XP (mine was a 2004 disc), and hence the subtraction from an otherwise 5 star product.
Once the OS was changed out, this motherboard became a dream to work with, startup seems instantaneous by comparison to XP, games and videos run extremely smoothly on this rig (even without a dedicated video card), and this board has every type of connection necessary for the typical modern computer and then some. As of the writing of this review, the computer has been operating beautifully for 3 months now without incident. All in all, I will be purchasing another one of these for my own computer and run it with the new A8-3870 processor coming out tomorrow. Until then, I will keep this review updated with any developments (good or bad), but I can strongly recommend this product for anyone looking to build or upgrade their computer for a great price (which is astonishingly cheap now) so long as you are running, or plan to run, Windows 7 64-bit or an equivalent to take advantage of all it has to offer and avoid the startup problems I’ve found associated with the older OS.
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|Great Item for the price,
Would have given it a 5 star rating if you could use the HDMI and DVI outputs simultaneously.
Overall not a bad product for the price.
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|Good Mobo. Stable.,
Good mobo. Stable. Would get 5 stars if their driver update tool worked correctly (kept getting 404 not found errors).
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