ASUS F1A75-I Deluxe (A75) Motherboard Review

Introduction

Like every mITX board I see shown on our news page, when I saw the ASUS F1A75-I Deluxe I instantly said to myself "It must be mine". I say it every time, I love the mITX format, but there's just something about an ASUS version of boards. It just tends to stand out more than its competitors.

This was really obvious when ASUS jumped on the Brazos platform; the ASUS E35M-I Deluxe I reviewed in May was an awesome motherboard and the heatsink setup just stood out so much more than other boards we looked at.

Of course, the Lynx platform doesn't have the APU embedded into the board, so we're not going to see the same kind of heatsink setup as it's not necessary. Can the F1A75-I Deluxe stand out from other mITX boards we've looked at recently, though? Well, as always, there's only one way to find out. Of course, before we get into the performance side of things we need to check out the package before we take a closer look at the motherboard.

Once we've done that we'll take a look at the BIOS to see what's going on there before we attempt to overclock the board, something that to date our mITX boards don't like doing. Can ASUS go against the trend, though? We'll find out soon enough, but first let's look at the package of the ASUS board.

The Package

Checking out the box, we don't have any real surprises with that typical ASUS design going on. The front gives us a model and a brief mention of the features on offer, while turning over gives us more of a rundown of what's going on.

Moving inside the package, we've got the normal culprits included; User Guide, Driver CD, pair of SATA cables and a rear I/O plate.

Outside of those normal bits and pieces, we've got a pair of antennas that are used in conjunction with the motherboard.

We've also got a remote and USB receiver. The remote is really cool; on one side we've got a full QWERTY keyboard going on that feels great, while on the other side we've got some more typical "media" like buttons. We're starting to see more companies offer these media remotes in the bundle, but ASUS is one of the first to include the QWERTY keyboard on one side which is going to be really handy.