ASRock A75M-ITX Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging and Bundle3. The ASRock A75M-ITX Motherboard4. The ASRock A75M-ITX Motherboard: BIOS and Overclocking5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 20127. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.58. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage9. Synthetic: 3DMark 1110. Synthetic: PCMark 711. Real World: Blu-Ray Performance12. Real World: MKV Performance13. Real World: Flash HD Performance14. Real World: Media Encoding Performance15. Gaming: DiRT 316. Gaming: F1 201017. Gaming: Call of Duty Black Ops18. Gaming: Dead Space 219. Closing Thoughts20. View All Pages

We have tested a number of motherboards from ASRock in the past which we have been generally very impressive. They cater for users of all levels, producing a range which encompasses both budget friendly, mid-range and high-end enthusiast motherboards. The Fatal1ty 990FX Professional Motherboard we looked at a while back was aimed at the top-end enthusiast segment of the market and delivered on every level.

Today we are going to look at the ASRock A75M-ITX motherboard which is aimed at the small-form-factor market. As its name suggests, the motherboard is Mini-ITX which makes it ideal to use within a compact HTPC.

We can also deduce from the product name that this particular motherboard features AMD's A75 Fusion Controller Hub, meaning it supports the latest USB3.0 and SATA-600 interfaces.

On paper, this motherboard looks to be well featured for a Mini-ITX board but we will see how it performs in our tests before making a final verdict.

The A75M-ITX is supplied in a small box which reflects the compact nature of the motherboard within. ASRock have chosen to give the box a brushed metal effect livery which looks surprisingly good considering it's printed onto cardboard. The top is unusually sparse for a motherboard box, only featuring the product name in the centre alongside a few small badges along the bottom edge which advertise the most prominent features of the board.

Turning the box over reveals a detailed breakdown of all the features and specifications of the motherboard , repeated in a few different languages. They also provide some performance comparisons between different configurations of APU and discrete graphics.

Inside, ASRock include a reasonable bundle with the motherboard which includes a software and driver CD, a comprehensive manual, an I/O shield, two SATA data cables and a 3.5mm audio cable. We would have liked to see a couple more SATA cables being included, though, as a lot of people will be using this motherboard to build a HTPC where a number of storage drives are likely to be employed.

Being a Mini-ITX motherboard, all of the components are packed very tightly together on the A75M-ITX. They have chosen to use a dark blue and black colour scheme for the PCB which looks great and will make it very easy to colour co-ordinate your system should you wish. The motherboard measures 17 x 17 cm (6.7 x 6.7-in).

The layout of the motherboard is a little different to most Mini-ITX motherboards that are on the market. Rather than locate the two RAM slots along the right hand edge of the board, ASRock have moved them to the top edge. This frees up the right hand side of the motherboard for a series of connections which include four SATA-600 connectors, the front panel connector, a fan header and an internal USB2.0 header.

Above the two memory slots at the top of the board we find two fan headers alongside the main 24-pin power connector for the motherboard.

We find the FM1 A-Series APU socket in the centre of the board alongside a single 4-pin CPU power header. Unlike most AMD motherboards we've seen in the past, the CPU cooler retention mechanism on the A75M-ITX is secured using push pins rather than screws. This suggests to us that ASRock are expecting users to use relatively small coolers with this motherboard in small form factor environments.

The A75M-ITX only features a single PCI Express x16 expansion slot due to the space restrictions of a Mini-ITX board. This can be combined with any PCI Express device, including a discrete graphics card to enable the Dual Graphics feature off AMD's A-Series APUs. We will be looking at the performance benefits of this later on in the review.

ASRock have all the bases covered when it comes to I/O connections on the back panel. From left to right we find a PS2 port, two USB3.0 ports, two USB2.0 ports, a RJ-45 Ethernet jack, two further USB3.0 ports, VGA and HDMI outputs, five 3.5mm audio connectors and a digital S/PDIF connection.

ASRock have developed a comprehensive UEFI which is one of the best out there, although not quite as feature filled as the ones we've seen on Asus motherboards. The interface is easy to navigate, letting us overclock the system in an easy to see manner.

Being a Mini-ITX motherboard, we weren't expecting to achieve a very significant overclock with the A75M-ITX. But, we were disappointed with the overclocking ability of the motherboard which is negligible at best. While it is possible to boot and load up windows with a substantial overclock, running any program to stress the system causes it to crash. Unfortunately, this also happened with a slight overclock; even a small bump in the baseclock of 5 MHz caused instability.

For our tests, we used a Thermaltake Contac29 to cool the AMD Vision A8-3850 APU and used a NZXT Hale90 750W power supply for the system.

Test System

Motherboard: Sapphire Pure Platinum A75
APU: AMD Vision A8-3850 2.9 GHz
Memory: 4 GB (2x 2GB) Corsair XMS3 1600 MHz
Power Supply: NZXT Hale90 750W
Cooler: Thermaltake Contac29
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Drive: Crucial M4 256 GB
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Graphics (APU Only): AMD Radeon HD 6550D (512 MB Allocated)
Graphics (Dual Graphics Mode for real world gaming tests): AMD Radeon HD 6690D2 (6550D + AMD Radeon 6670) – tests in this mode are listed ‘DG’

Other Hardware

Viewsonic VX2260WM 1920 x 1080 Monitor

Software:

SiSoft Sandra 2011 SP3
Cinebench R11.5
3DMark 11
3DMark Vantage
PCMark 7
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink PowerDVD 11
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6
DiRT 3
F1 2010
Dead Space 2
Call of Duty: Black Ops

All tests are averaged from a series of five separate runs. This ensures that no abnormalities can creep into the final, published results.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)

• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)

• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)

• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor

• MC – Multi-Core

• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading

• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions

• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics

• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access

• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86

• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

These results are exactly what we would expect from the stock system as configured.

Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

In this test we can see how much better the A8-3850 APU performs in multi-threaded tasks compared to single threaded tasks.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

Again, these results reflect what we would expect from an A8-3850 based system configured in this way.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

A very similar set of results to what we saw in 3DMark Vantage but, this time, DirectX 11 performance is taken into account.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

This score gives us a good idea of the all-round performance of the system which is about what we would expect from this particular configuration.

Our good friends at Cyberlink kindly supplied the software for our BluRay and conversion tests.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 11 is one of the finest solutions for the BluRay experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the Blu-Ray Disc of Independence Day.

This system handled blu-ray playback with ease, giving us confidence that this motherboard will be perfect in an HTPC.

Many people who have media systems will be familiar with the Matroska (.mkv) file format which is often used for high definition video. In this test we will be using VLC Media Player to play a 1080P MKV file while recording CPU usage using Performance Monitor

The system maintains a very good average demand throughout our testing phase, averaging around 16 percent usage.

Many people using this system will be enjoying Flash related content so we feel it is important to test with some of the more demanding material available freely online. Full hardware acceleration is enabled.

Another good result for the system, showing that it can play flash HD video with ease.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 1.09GB 720p MKV file (44mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version of this program.

There wasn't a massive difference in performance with hardware encoding enabled but the results we recorded here are in line with what we've previously experienced.

DiRT 3 was released quite recently and has received a lot of praise from gamers and reviewers across the globe. It is the latest iteration of the Colin McRae Rally series, despite Codemasters dropping the Colin McRae branding. It supports DirectX 11 which enhances detail and brings a number of other visual enhancements to the gaming experience.

Another good set of results for this A8-3850 based system, showing how capable it is in one of the latest games.

F1 2010 is the first multi format high def Formula one title, having been in development for almost 2 and a half years now you can tell Codemasters are not messing around when it comes to releasing the best game they can. F1 2010 is packed with everything, from fine tuning your car setup, practising laps with goals to achieve, detailed stats, various difficulty settings for newbs and pros and even a helmet selection!

In this test we saw a huge boost in performance when the HD6670 was added to the system in dual graphics mode.

Call of Duty Black Ops is a first person shooter around 50 years ago and is the latest game in the Call of Duty franchise. While many gamers favour the previous iteration, Modern Warfare 2, Black Ops is played by millions of gamers across the globe and doesn’t require top end kit to achieve a playable experience. So it is a perfect game to test with the AMD Vision A8-3850 APU.

These results reflect exactly what we would expect from this system based on our previous experiences with this platform.

Dead Space 2 is a survival horror third-person shooter. The player controls Isaac Clarke from a third-person point of view, looking over the character’s right shoulder. The game features no HUD elements, relying on holograms projected from the player character and his weapons to show information such as messages and ammunition count, respectively. Player health and stasis is shown by a visual indicators located on Isaac’s back. Isaac must fight an alien organism that infects and takes control of human corpses, turning them into “Necromorphs”, mutating their bodies.

Necromorphs must be dismembered as the alien organism controls host bodies via tentacles extending into their limbs. Other, larger types of Necromorphs that cannot be dismembered will often have yellow, glowing pustules, indicating weak spots. Occasionally, when an enemy gets close enough to Isaac, they will grab a hold of him, and the player must repeatedly press a key to fend off the enemy, with failure to do so leading to death of the player character.

Based on the results of this test and the other gaming tests, we would highly recommend that you add in a discrete card in dual graphics mode if you plan to game on this system.

Overall, we are left with generally positive impressions from the ASRock A75M-ITX motherboard. The compact form factor makes it ideal for use in an home theatre or small form factor PC where space is very limited.  But, unfortunately, we experienced some issues trying to achieve a stable overclock.

While we were able to boot the system with a substantial overclock the system proved unstable under load, even when we reduced the overclock significantly.  So we can only really recommend the A75M-ITX to those who don't want to overclock their system … unless we received a poor sample.  Aside from overclocking, the motherboard performed exactly as we would expect.

The ASRock A75M-ITX can be yours for a shade under £75 at Lambdatek which we think is quite a reasonable price tag.  It is around £20 cheaper than the better featured Asus F1A75-I Deluxe motherboard which we tested in detail here.

We're sure that there are plenty of users who will opt to pay the £20 extra for built-in Wi-Fi and an overclocking capability but, for those who don't need these features, the A75M-ITX is a good choice.

Pros:

• Well laid out.
• Mini-ITX form factor.
• Good Bundle.

Cons:

• Doesn't overclock easily.
• No Wifi.

KitGuru says: A good budget Mini-ITX option for those who don't need to overclock.

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