so today I'm going to be doing an unboxing of the MSI a75 ma
G55 this is part of their military Class 2 standard of motherboards so this
although it is a microatx board is not a lowend board in terms of the build
quality or the features okay let's see what kind of badges they've got here on
the front of it so it's Windows 7 ready good AMD Vision okay AMD recommended USB
3 SATA 3 6 GB per second and they've got a really shiny certified military
standard stamp on here that actually looks looks really cool okay let's go
and look on the back what do we have here so more about military class so
we've got highly condu sorry about that guys highly conductive polymerized
capacitors with tantalum cores up to eight times longer lifetime we've got
super farite chokes with up to 30% higher current capacity and all solid
caps giving you 10 plus years of ultra long lifetime next we've got the MSI
control center which allows you to Monitor and tune your computer system click BIOS which means it is UEFI that
means you can use the mouse in the BIOS and ey charger so you can charge your
iPad or iPhone or mobile at high speed
yes you can charge your iPad off of the USB ports on this motherboard although
only certain ones M flash allows you to easily flash your BIOS and USB Safeguard
allows you to hm that's interesting so dual current protection allows you to uh
protect your USB chipset from static damage which can happen on some cases if
the uh the ports aren't properly configured uh oh this is
interesting okay um what do we got here so in terms
of package we have an IO plate this is a PCI back plate with USB 3 so if you
don't have front USB 3 well at least you can add a couple more ports to the back
we've got two SATA 3 6 GB per second cables uh remember these are the same as
SATA 2 3 GB per second cables except they have white tips so those are both
straight to right angle we have a Molex TSA power adapter we have an IO Shield
that is helpfully colorcoded we have a military class
quick installation guide showing you how
to install your Apu how to install your memory all that good
stuff there we go next we have drivers in utilities download the latest from
MSI we have their M connector which allows you to easily plug in your front
panel switches as well as your front usb2 top quality and stability this is
your user guide so that's basically the
quick user guide in a book form with some other
stuff now on to the board itself this is
an fm1 socket board so what that means
is that it is not compatible with phenoms and athlons CP us this is
compatible with apus so in this case I have an AMD A8 series Apu that I will be
using with this particular board and that means that it has both a CPU
component and a GPU component highly
integrated into this socket so let's
look at the overall layout here so we have our fm1 socket right here we've got
what looks like a perfectly normal AMD mounting bracket and it is so these are
all the same mounting holes and mounting clips that we've seen in the past you can use your old heat sinks no problem
we've got our power delivery as well as our pwm heat sink here we have a 4 pin
CPU power connector and it's ideal location at the top left corner we've
also got four DDR3 dual Channel socket
so you can plug in up to four sticks of memory running in dual Channel we've got
our 24 pin power connector in its ideal location a four pin pwm system fan
connector six SATA 3 6 GB per second
ports very cool to see that we've got is
that really a parallel port header okay um there's our front panel connector so
that's your power and uh hard drive and
uh reset and all that good stuff okay we've got our front USB another front
USB front USB 3 off a header this is
great to see so in addition to the two USB 3 ports at the back of the board
we've also got two more supplied at the front or with the PCI bracket at the
back we have our front panel audio and then in terms of slot layout we've got
dual PCIe 16x slots those are both wired
for 16x but if you are going to run Crossfire X I believe they are going to
run at 8X 8X we have our PCI e1x slot as
well as a PCI slot got another fan header here that's a three pin fan
header so we have two four pin and one three pin fan headers on this
motherboard let's move around to the back of the board where we have 1 2 3 4
USB 2.0 ports one PS2 us uh mouse
keyboard combo Port we've also got HDMI DVI and VGA out so of note is the fact
that okay two things this supports dual link DVI so up to 2560 x600 resolution
and of note is the fact that on the fm1 socket every chip that fits in here an
APU Chip is going to enable the use of these ports gigabit Ethernet two USB 3.0
ports and 7.1 audio one of the other features that is highly touted for this
platform form is dual Graphics which works similar to how hybrid Crossfire
used to work but better so basically you plug in your Apu you plug in a supported
GPU and they will actually have the two Graphics cores the two Graphics
structures work together for directx10 and
directx11 compatible games and applications to increase performance so
it's a pretty good value way to upgrade your Apu system if you just need a
little bit more kick so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the a75
m55 don't forget to subscribe to lineus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews and
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