Although ECS didnt provide a picture with its announcement earlier today pertaining to its AMD socket FM1 boards, a picture of the A75F-A motherboard has now turned out via a German website. This is the first picture of a production AMD FM1 motherboard to appear and we cant say that were entirely sold on ECS design choices.
Its amazing how much more information you have at your fingertips once a picture is posted of a new motherboard and now we can do a much more detailed breakdown on whats coming. The most obvious part is the CPU socket with the 950-pin FM1 socket and this is also what seems to be the main reason for AMDs change to its CPU cooler retention mechanism. We saw the split design being demonstrated by ASRock at CeBIT earlier this year and it now makes a lot more sense, as the FM1 socket and the AMD3+ will be sharing the same CPU coolers.
The PWM design is really basic, to the extent that were almost surprised had we not seen AMDs in-house testing board already. Were looking at what appears to be a 4+1 phase design. The board has a simple 4-pin +12V connector rather than the now almost standard 8-pin one which together with the PWM design is suggesting that were looking at a fairly power frugal set of CPUs.
The board has a single x16 PCI Express slot, a single x4 PCI Express slot, two x1 PCI Express slots and three PCI Slots. Were not quite sure why ECS has placed them as it has, as if you want to use a dual-width slot in the x4 slot at the same time as using a dual-slot graphics card, then youre out of PCI Express expansion slots.
The board has as we mentioned in our previous news story, five SATA 6Gbps ports and there are also pin headers for what appears to be two USB 3.0 ports, six USB 2.0 ports and a serial and parallel port. Around the back were looking at a PS/2 port, four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out and of course an HDMI, DVI and D-sub connector. Theres also a clear CMOS button located here.
Despite being part of ECS Black Deluxe series the A75F-A only has solid capacitors located near power regulation circuitry and elsewhere on the board were looking at traditional electrolyte capacitors, somewhat disappointing on a higher-end board these days. Apparently there support for DDR3 memory up to 1866MHz, at least judging by the silk screening on the PCB. Overall we have mixed feelings about this very first AMD FM1 board, but wed expect better things to come.
Source: PC Games Hardware
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