Asus F1A75-M Pro Llano Motherboard Preview

A Closer LookA first glance at the board reminds us of other boards that we’ve seen from Asus, especially ones that brand the “Pro” name with its black and blue styling. The board is nicely laid out on a Micro ATX form factor and is styled extremely well.

Four dual channel memory slots are in their usual location and are styled to coincide with the rest of the board. The board supports up to 64GB of DDR3 1066, 1333, 1600 and 1866MHz memory.

For a board of this size, Asus have tried to cater for the majority of interfaces used. When looking at the expansion slots we see two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots which gives this board functionality for CrossFireX but sadly no SLI support here. There is also a PCI-Express x1 slot and a legacy PCI slot.

Plenty of front panel connectors are on this board including a native USB 3.0 header and a whole bunch of USB 2.0 headers so you’ll never be without connectivity. There is also a COM port header to the left.

For a board of this size, you can expect it to be aimed at the HTPC market which always leaves storage as a vital aspect of choosing a board. With this board you’ll find no issue as it sports a total of six SATA 6Gb/s ports supporting several RAID configurations thanks to the AMD A75 chipset.

The patented EPU, TPU and MemOK switches and button are situated on the edge of the board allowing users to get the very best performance and efficiency from their system. We will focus more on this in the upcoming review.

The rear I/O panel shows a variety of connections for the latest peripherals and display outputs. From the left there is a PS2 mouse/keyboard combo port, with two USB 3.0 ports below it, an optical SPDIF output, HDMI, VGA, DVI, another two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit LAN and 8-channel audio leaving this to be a perfect choice for different HTPC users.