The Motherboard

Getting onto the board, you can see we're dealing with the mATX format. Being one of the more budget orientated boards also means we've got that baby blue setup going on. Like most people, I'm not really a fan of the color, but the chances are if your budget sits around this level, you're not sporting a case with a window, so it's probably not too much of an issue. Anyway, with that looked at, let's move in a bit closer and see what's going on.

Moving in a bit closer to the board, you can see we've got a single legacy PCI slot, two PCIe x1 slots and a PCIe x16 slot that runs at x16. It's a fairly standard setup when it comes to a mATX board and it's good to see the A55 chipset continues to get the PCIe x16 slot at x16 speed.

Moving across to the bottom of the board, you can see there's not heaps going on with our front panel audio header on the left, our TPM and COM headers and two USB 2.0 headers.

At the very end of the board and around the corner you can see we've got a total of six SATA ports. These are all SATA II and run natively off the A55 chipset. This is one of the main differences between the A75 and A55 chipset with the cheaper A55 lacking SATA III ports. If you're not going to go down the SATA III drive path, though, you might not feel there's much point to getting a board that has SATA III.