Review: ASRock FM2A75 Pro4-M

by Tarinder Sandhu on 9 November 2012, 09:14 4.0

Tags: AsRock

Final thoughts and rating

The A75 Pro4-M's features, layout, BIOS and performance are all better than expected given its £50 price tag.

We've had the opportunity of evaluating three of AMD's latest APU chips. Each time we've commented that they make most sense when paired together with a small-form factor, inexpensive motherboard. ASRock duly obliges by basing an mATX board around the mid-spec A75 chipset, which, according to our findings, performs just as well as a high-end A85X board.

The A75 Pro4-M's features, layout, BIOS and performance are all better than expected given its £50 price tag, leaving us with little reason for complaint. Perhaps a few more USB 3.0 ports on the back wouldn't go amiss and some may want the security that comes from having a second BIOS chip on the board, but these are minor gripes set against a lot of good.

If it was our money on the table we'd probably look at the £70 Mini-ITX version and pair it with the A10-5700 65W APU to make a small, feature-rich and quiet system. But if you're in the market for a second-generation AMD FM2 APU PC you should certainly put the ASRock A75 Pro4-M on your list, particularly if value is a key concern.

The Good

Solid performance
Attractive pricing
Above-average BIOS

The Bad

The platform, as a whole, offers limited performance

HEXUS Rating

ASRock FM2A75 Pro4-M

HEXUS Awards

ASRock FM2A75 Pro4-M

HEXUS Where2Buy

TBC.

HEXUS Right2Reply

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A very nice board, I prefer the SATA sockets to be at right angles (and ATX socket but that haardly ever happens these days) as better for cable management.

Is there any MSata connection? If MB makers would bring this up to SATA3 standards then I would happily use that (less cabling) as main boot drive

I got this board in a new hybrid HTPC build. I spent the last few days fine tuning the overclock on it, and it holds up really nicely. The memory modules are kind of close to the cpu block, so if you have a vertical heatsink and fan it will probably be a tight fit without low profile memory modules.

The bios is pretty solid. The manual is completely useless though, and some of the features, like the check ready bit ACPI option is completely glyphic (its a mechanical hard drive rev up check that can prevent resuming from suspend on an SSD so don't have it on with an SSD). The board temps barely go over 30c and I have the northbridge at 1.35 volts with a 15x multipler (the standard is 1.15 and 9x). I had to rev up some Corsair 2133mhz ram to 1.51 volts to get stock ratings without crashing on large gpu transfers, but that could be caused by a wide variety of things, from the northbridge to the PSU slightly undercutting the voltage to the modules being slightly off standard.

I did an in-depth guide to what all the features of this board (and most of the Asrock Piledriver UEFI features) that I posted in the forum here.

Is there any MSata connection? If MB makers would bring this up to SATA3 standards then I would happily use that (less cabling) as main boot drive

Yes, there is an MSATA that replaces 1 of the 6 mainboard sata connectors on the back panel. Though I feel like mentioning that you don't put the hard drives in cases just for the hell of it, good cases have anti-vibration support and have active fans to keep the drives cool. Even though you would have a really hard time overheating a mechanical drive (and definitely not an SSD) magnetic disks stay more stable if you keep the temps low.

Zanny: thanks for the reply. I assume the Msata is sata 2 not sata 3?

Have to admit to being tempted by this board. I have the ASRock z77 mini itx board and am very pleased with it although being a mini-itx board overclocking is a bit minimal. Previously I have tended to stick to ASUS boards but ASRock would definitely be considered.

I tend to work with low airflow cases (low noise) so cable tidying is an obsession, and it looks nicer!

as far as I can tell there's no msata on this board (not surprising, there's very little spare room on an matx board to fit the slot) - there is esata which will almost certainly be sata 3, but no msata. Given that AMD don't have anything like Intel Smart Response there's little incentive for mobo manufacturers to include msata on AMD boards…

Still the insist on putting the 12v aux connector there - why can they not move it to where the main atx connector is ?

Lack of clearance round the cpu is going to be a issue for some.

Why in 2012 are they still putting d-sub and dvi on ? why not move over to hdmi and save a load of space

In fact these are the same issue i have with my asus FM1 mobo :(