ECS A75F-A motherboard review - Introduction

AMD APU Llano based processors arrived onto the market with moderate success, face it if you do not have a lot of money to spend and need a nice HTPC, Net PC or just a generic PC that can even play a game or two, well... that's where the A6 and A8 series of Llano based APU's can offer nice value for money.

The processor slash APU isn't the only thing important there though, you need to pair that APU processor with a motherboard and luckily most motherboard manufacturers have a wide selection available for you.

They aren't shabby either, I mean you get fully blown and beefed up motherboards covering SATA3 (6G) compatibility, USB 3.0, integrated HDMI and much more. All in all you pair a 100 EUR motherboard with a 100 EUR APU, throw in some storage and A PSU and you got yourself a pretty sweet deal in your hands.

Today we look at a A75 motherboard from ECS, in the 100 EUR bracket they have released the A75F-A, a board that ECS decided to pair with two PCI Express x16 slots (the second one is x4 electronically), two PCI Express x1 slots as well as with no less than three legacy PCI slots.

Being an entry level product CPU power is based of a a 4+1 phase design, is cooled by a passive aluminum heatsink. We mentioned SATA3 already, the A75F-A features five SATA 6Gbps slots driven by the Hudson D3 chipset, a sixth is routed to the back of the board as an eSATA connector.

Together with a PS/2 port, four USB 2.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out, and by a pair of USB 3.0 ports (two more are available via an on-board header) for the money you will get a lot of motherboard alright.

Have a quick peek and then let's head onwards into the review.