Asus F1A75-V PRO review

Asus’s F1A75-V PRO is one of the most expensive FM1 motherboards around, but there are several immediately obvious justifications for the price that impressed us when we first reviewed it. If you’re going to overclock your Llano processor then you’ll be pleased to find a glossy UEFI interface rather than the old-fashioned BIOS. There are plenty of automatic optimisation settings that make it easier for inexperienced overclockers to boost their PC’s performance too.

F1A75-V Pro has two PCI-Express x16 slots for one or two graphics cards, a couple of PCI Express x1 slots for newer expansion cards, one of which will be blocked if you fit a dedicated graphics card, and three PCI slots for older expansion cards. The board has seven SATA3 ports for hard disks and optical drives, plus one eSATA3 port.

On the back panel are two USB2 and four USB3 ports, in addition to four USB2 headers and a USB3 header for two more USB3 ports if your case has the necessary sockets. This gives you a huge amount of room for expansion. There’s even a serial port header. A DisplayPort socket caters for your Llano CPU’s on-chip graphics capabilities, as do the HDMI, VGA and DVI video outputs.

The F1A75-V Pro’s performance was excellent, providing an overall score of 68 in our benchmark tests and a frame rate of 28.5 in our integrated graphics test running Dirt3 at a 720p resolution and high quality.

We replicated a minor problem encountered when we installed Windows the first time we used this motherboard, the problem being that the UEFI only responds to a keyboard and mouse plugged into two of the USB3 ports, while Windows’ installer only recognises them when they’re connected to the USB2 ports.

However, this is a known issue with the operating system installer’s lack of native USB3 support, something we subsequently encountered with other motherboards. It’s easily solved by ensuring that you use the USB2 ports when installing Windows, so we’re happy to withdraw our previous objection and give the F1A75-V Pro our coveted Best Buy award, particularly given the motherboard’s recent drop in price.