Asus F1A75-I Deluxe FM1 Motherboard Review

AMD caused quite a stir when they released the Fusion set of APU’s as it gave rival competition to Intel but with support for DirectX 11. Motherboard manufacturers were keen to jump on board producing Mini-ITX based boards around the E-350 APU. Shortly after the E-350 saga, AMD released the next in the APU line-up and this included the A8-3850, shortly followed by the slightly lower spec A6-3650 which differed by giving users a fully fledged socket, opposed to an all-in-one soldered APU like the E-350 had. This gave users a bit more flexibility in terms of upgrading the APU as and when they wanted or needed to.

With the Fusion platform as a whole doing really well in the market place, and many users finding that it’s a better alternative to an Atom/ION solution, a lot of brands were keen to manufacturer boards that can harness the true potential of the socket and overall platform.

With this in mind, we saw the likes of the Asus F1A75-M Pro Micro ATX board, Gigabyte A75M-UD2H board and even some new contenders with the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 motherboard and whilst these particular products offered exactly what was needed, it took up a lot of space in the process.

This is where Mini-ITX comes into play as the Fusion platform has been accepted extremely well into the HTPC community and with motherboard vendors realising the potential behind it, they have started to develop boards with exactly that in mind.

To me, Mini-ITX is a fantastic platform as I find it so fascinating when companies can implement all of these wonderful features into such a small form factor, and that’s exactly what Asus have done with the board we’re looking at today. We’re taking a look at the F1A75-I Deluxe motherboard which is aimed directly at the home entertainment market with some unique features that will surely push them ahead in this segment of the market, right?