ASRock A75M-ITX Motherboard Review

Being a Mini-ITX motherboard, all of the components are packed very tightly together on the A75M-ITX. They have chosen to use a dark blue and black colour scheme for the PCB which looks great and will make it very easy to colour co-ordinate your system should you wish. The motherboard measures 17 x 17 cm (6.7 x 6.7-in).

The layout of the motherboard is a little different to most Mini-ITX motherboards that are on the market. Rather than locate the two RAM slots along the right hand edge of the board, ASRock have moved them to the top edge. This frees up the right hand side of the motherboard for a series of connections which include four SATA-600 connectors, the front panel connector, a fan header and an internal USB2.0 header.

Above the two memory slots at the top of the board we find two fan headers alongside the main 24-pin power connector for the motherboard.

We find the FM1 A-Series APU socket in the centre of the board alongside a single 4-pin CPU power header. Unlike most AMD motherboards we've seen in the past, the CPU cooler retention mechanism on the A75M-ITX is secured using push pins rather than screws. This suggests to us that ASRock are expecting users to use relatively small coolers with this motherboard in small form factor environments.

The A75M-ITX only features a single PCI Express x16 expansion slot due to the space restrictions of a Mini-ITX board. This can be combined with any PCI Express device, including a discrete graphics card to enable the Dual Graphics feature off AMD's A-Series APUs. We will be looking at the performance benefits of this later on in the review.

ASRock have all the bases covered when it comes to I/O connections on the back panel. From left to right we find a PS2 port, two USB3.0 ports, two USB2.0 ports, a RJ-45 Ethernet jack, two further USB3.0 ports, VGA and HDMI outputs, five 3.5mm audio connectors and a digital S/PDIF connection.

Become a Patron!