Exclusive: ASRock's A75M-ITX pictured
We expected someone to launch a mini-ITX board based on AMD's new A75 chipset for the FM1 socket and now we can offer you some exclusive pictures of what is the first mini-ITX board for the new platform, the ASRock A75M-ITX. We expect to be seeing a lot more mini-ITX boards based on the platform next week at Computex, so keep your eyes peeled.
The A75M-ITX is a rather basic board, but by no means featureless. As this is a mini-ITX board it only has a single x16 PCI Express, but at least ASRock decided to fit a pair of full-size DIMMs, albeit at a slightly unusual position on the board. There are only four SATA 6Gbps ports and two pin headers for four USB 2.0 ports on the board, not exactly a lot, but we'd expect this to be a very affordable board. Ok, so there's a x16 PCI Express slot as well, so it's not all doom and gloom.
Things improve a bit once we have a look around the back as here we find a PS/2 port, four USB 3.0 ports two USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out and a D-sub and HDMI connector. We're really starting to wish that motherboard makers would give up on the D-sub connector, as it's simply just not needed any more and we'd much preferred a second digital display connector of some kind. Do note that the board supports HDMI 1.4a which means that it can handle high-resolution displays unlike older HDMI versions.
Overall this is a pretty decent little board, although the design isn't what we'd call perfect with the DIMMs blocking spare that could otherwise have been used for additional rear ports. Then again, it's a mini-ITX board and there's not really anything that we're sorely missing on this board and if the price is right, we can see this becoming a very popular motherboard.
Exclusive: ASRock's A75M-ITX pictured
Reply With Quote
Posting Permissions
