Final Words - ASUS F1A75-M Pro Review

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.

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