MSI A75MA-G55 (A75) Motherboard Review

Introduction

We've already had a look at a bunch of A75 motherboards and today we look at an offering from MSI known as the MSI A75MA-G55. This board stood out instantly for me thanks to its mATX format, which is something that I've been looking for since we received our first A75 motherboard.

So what's the mATX format mean for the board today? What are we going to be missing out on? Are we losing performance because we move to the smaller platform? Well, let's hope it offers us everything we like about the A75 chipset, just in a smaller package.

Before we get into the performance side of things, first we need to look at what's going on with the package. Once that's done we'll of course be venturing into the motherboard to see how everything looks. We'll then check out the BIOS before we get into the overclocking side of things and find out what kind of performance this mATX board can offer us. First things first; let's look at what's going on with the package.

The Package

Of course, we've got a bit of a smaller box than our other A75 boards we've looked at because as we said, it's a mATX board we're dealing with instead of the ATX size we've been seeing from other companies. As usual, there's a fair bit of information on offer and the back of the box gives us a good run down of the major features that are present on the motherboard.

Moving inside the package, we can see we've got some paperwork, driver / utilities CD, two SATA cables, Molex to SATA connector, easy connectors for your front panel and our rear I/O panel.

The stand out bonus would be the inclusion of the USB 3.0 header that MSI have chosen to include. It's nice to see companies give us the header, offering us a couple of extra ports, especially since they put the headers on the motherboard.