ASUS F1A75-I Deluxe Review – Llano and Mini-ITX
by Ian Cutress on October 1, 2011 5:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Asus
- A75
Final Words
ASUS mini-ITX boards always have the potential for greatness within them. A strong background in hardware design with support and software to match is part of ASUS’ strategy to be number one when it comes to motherboards on the global scale.
The F1A75-I Deluxe was sent to me unexpectedly along with another board I had requested, but I chose to review this one first, as I am a big fan of the mini-ITX format. If we look at the design of the board and the low profile, ASUS is making a push here to the small form factor Llano arrangements niche with aplomb. The styling works, with everything laid out neatly, especially the wifi module and connectors to the back panel. I would have liked a couple more fan headers, but ASUS are clearly aiming at the lower powered Llano processors with this design – strap on a low powered CPU and a low profile cooler, some low profile memory and stick it in a case for maximum effect.
The BIOS as far as I can tell is rock solid, though overclocking leads a little to be desired, with the board not getting into Windows beyond 107 MHz in AHCI mode. This again would suggest more towards a low powered setup, especially with extra energy saving technologies like the ASUS EPU. However in IDE mode, the board would happily run at 140 MHz (3640 MHz total), leading me to suggest that if AHCI is not a concern, then IDE mode would be the way to go.
The software works for the most part, and you cannot fault the fan controls. I would have liked more in the box, especially as I do not find the extra wireless controller appealing in terms of ergonomics or functionality, but the wireless antenna work for me, especially if you have somewhere to magnetize them to (preferably not a mechanical hard drive!).
Performance wise, we can see the difference extra memory speed makes – when comparing the A8-3850 at DDR3-1333 and A6-3650 at DDR3-1866, where the Sorenson Squeeze test comes in over 700 seconds faster. However, there are no big surprises here in most of the benchmarks. Only the DPC Latency test gives cause for concern, when AI Suite II was running. This will not affect most users at all, and I would hazard at a guess that those who it would affect have a larger budget for a more powerful platform anyway.
As I was testing this board with a pre-release BIOS, it stands to assume that ASUS may iron out some of these discrepancies by the time the board comes to market. ASUS will offer the F1A75-I Deluxe with a three year warranty, and I am told should be released with at $145, indicating a $30 premium over the full ATX size ASUS F1A75-V Pro.
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bijeshn - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
How good is the onboard wireless 802.11 b/g/n implementation on this board?mitcoes - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
I do think this devices are ATOM competence.As they provide a remote control, pobrably to be used as set top boxrs attached to TVs.
Google TV, Android, Desktop Linux, and even Hackintosh are the OSs that will run better.
MS WOS is for AMD Phenom and bulldozers or iNTEL I3 to i9 not for Llano or ATOM.
At this kind of devices nix works far more better than MS WOS.
Death666Angel - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
And why exactly is that?Also, can Linux play commercial blurays, yet? Can I legally install MacOS on a non-Apple PC? Does Google TV or Android have an easy installation routine and easy navigation on a PC?
CharonPDX - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
*SEEMS* good. But to use a USB dongle, rather than either CIR (standard WinMCE protocol) or Bluetooth seems dopey. Heck, I'd like to see it use CIR for the WinMCE side, and Bluetooth for the keyboard/mouse half...MobiusStrip - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
When these babies have Thunderbolt, they're gonna rock.justniz - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 - link
Please stop using 1024x768 for gaming benchmarks.I'm pretty sure practically no gamer uses a 4:3 monitor or plays in such a low resolution.
Whats wrong with 1920x1080?
Furthermore with any modern GPU, at such a low res th'eres a strong chance all you're maxing out is the DMA bandwidth to/from the GPU, not its rendering muscles.
mariush - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 - link
Actually a better resolution would be 1280x720.Since it's 16:9, various wide format monitors would not distort the image and since it's HDMI native TVs would probably upscale it just fine to 1920x1080.
Such resolution is suitable to test on board video cards (and cpu embedded video cards) - with higher resolutions you may get into memory bandwidth issues and then you're not really testing the gpu anymore..
ddrum2000 - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - link
I agree with many that this review is a bit flawed. I'd like to see this board compared to the AsRock A75M-ITX and the Zotac A75ITX-A-E . In addition the A8-3850 is not the best HTPC CPU because of the high TDP. The A8-3800 with a 65 W TDP (I think) would be a much better HTPC comparison. Thanks to the person who said that the Scythe Big Shuriken will not fit as the was the cooler I was planning to use. Thoughts?AnnihilatorX - Thursday, October 6, 2011 - link
I am looking for a power efficient mini-ITX buildI was hoping to see some power consumption benchmark :/
Soulkeeper - Sunday, October 16, 2011 - link
I think your motherboard review would be improved if you included the following:A table containing the bios min/max for all voltage, fsb, mult, etc. settings
Tomshardware does this when they compare motherboards and it's really helpful :)
Also I can't help but wonder if the wifi can be removed and replaced with a mSATA/'miniPCIe' SSD and used as the boot drive.
Thank you