Asus F1A75-I Deluxe FM1 Motherboard Review

Another Asus board and another big smile on our faces. We say this because they seem to keep amazing us, by offering big features in a small form factor and the F1A75-I Deluxe is a perfect example of that. It packs a mighty big punch, yet leaves a very small footprint, and we mean; small. The F1A75-I Deluxe comes with everything you could think of when looking for a board, aimed at the HTPC market, especially when looking at the added bonus of WiFi and the stylish remote control that comes bundled.

Style wise, it’s not the prettiest little thing in the world, but who cares, as it will sit comfortably and quietly away inside a slimline HTPC chassis that we’re sure will ooze sophistication and style as it sits by your latest LED 3D televisions.

Performance wise we saw typical results that most A75 boards have shown since the launch but that’s not what these boards are all about, instead they are focussed on offering the performance when needed but at the same time using a low amount of power and being a rival to some of the product ranges that Intel have to offer currently.

If you are a user wanting to squeeze more performance out of the system, you’ll find that overclocking this board is a real gem as it featured the simple, yet effective UEFI BIOS that we’ve come to love from Asus. By using auto settings, 3.77GHz was acheived which firstly is a fantastic feat for Llano, but even more so considering this board is Mini-ITX based.

Now we have to look at price and some may consider this board as expensive at around £110 and with little availabilityy at the moment, we believe that as retailers start to stock the F1A75-I Deluxe, we should see the price coming down to sub £100. Our opinion simply rests with the overall package which we can see is worthwhile. The board offers a lot of bundled extras, good performance at stock and fantastic overclocking potential all from a board that’s small enough to fit into any type of chassis.

The bottom line is that this board is one of our top picks and we’d recommend it to anyone wanting a fully-fledged, feature packaged system without compromising performance or space and we take our hat off to Asus for doing another great job.