today I'm going to be doing my first socket fm1 motherboard unboxing this is
the ASUS f1a 75m Pro it uses the AMD a75
chipset as I mentioned before fm1 socket this is a brand new socket this is for
special chips cuz I can't even call them CPUs anymore that are called apus so
they have a CPU component a graphicss component and that is a DirectX 11 ready
Graphics component so let's Dive Right into this so we've got A8 Vision or E2
Vision I'm actually not familiar with that what that means but the chip that
I'll be trying this with is actually an A8 CP GPU Apu sorry it's an APU so that
is what I will be having uh in terms of my experience this A8 Vision level okay
we have Digi plus vrm that's nice to see on a microatx board UEFI iOS also great
to see uh their TPU and epu processors
for performance and Energy savings respectively USB 3 is featured on this
chipset and let's have a look at the back so the digi plus vrm they're
showing you that lower interference is better I should certainly think so and
giving us a little bit more information about those features so the epu is all
about uh detecting your current PC loadings and automatically adjusting the
Energy savings TPU is for Turbo they've got their auto system level up up autot
tuning that's available in the BIOS as well and the ufi BIOS allows you to use
a mouse their their ufi BIOS layout is actually outstanding so uh I would
definitely recommend using it if you have this board not that you'll have a
choice you'll have to use it okay oh this is a slightly different packaging
layout than I've seen on isus motherboards before so let's take the
board out really quick here and let's uh have a look at what they've done with
their accessories okay we've got two SATA 3 6
GB per second cable yes this is SATA 3 6 GB per second
native motherboard so the chipset supports you don't need any third party
chips and that is six ports so they're both straight to right angle cables we
have a user's guide which includes a driver DVD as well as a powered by Aus
sticker download the latest drivers off Theus or AMD website next we have an IO
Shield which is helpfully labeled in terms of what's what now let's have a
look at the board itself okay
this is going to be a good unboxing because it's the first one of a brand
new platform I'm always excited about that kind of stuff so why don't we start
right here this is the socket fm1 now it
looks similar to socket am3 but it's not quite the same first of all I want you
guys to notice these blocked off pins right here can you see those okay so
those blocked off pins right there right away you know socket fm1 if you can't
read so you're not going to even be able to physically fit older am2 or am3
processors into thisof socket now I also want to show you guys how to tell which
way to orient your CPU there's a little triangle right there you're going to
match that up with a little gold triangle on the bottom of your chip
that's the way to put it in you lift up your lever you put CPU and you lock it
down that's how it works it works with A4 A6 and A8 apus and you will have full
support for onboard Graphics remember uh one of their competitors had kind of a
silly platform before where depending on which CPU you plugged in you did or
didn't have access to the onboard Graphics it will all work no problem
okay we've got our eight pin power in its ideal location up at the top left
corner of the board we have a CPU pwm fan header right there we have support
for dual Channel DDR3 memory up to four
slots just like that we have our epu and
TPU switches right here we've also got a memo k switch so what that means is no
matter what memory you're running in here you can press the memo okay button to boot it up and the memory will run at
a safe setting so you can get into the BIOS and make any adjustments to the
timings and speed our 24 pin connectors in its ideal location along the right
hand Edge we've got another pwm chassis fan controller we've got our chipset
here which is excellent to see it's got a little tiny heat sink on it so it's
clearly not doing much uh most of the most of the cool stuff is happening up
here in the Apu we've got six theta 3 6
gbit per second ports those are native those are off the AMD chipset awesome
love to see that here's our front panel headers so that's for your power switch
your LEDs your all that good stuff we have a USB 3 internal header that's also
oh that's terrific to this board has six usb3 ports on a microatx port
outstanding we've got four USB 2 headers cuz all that support is still built into
the chipset so I guess assus figured well we'll just throw the headers on
there they can plug in as much USB as they please okay we've got our front
panel audio and in terms of the slot L look at that another four pin pwm fan
this is actually a pretty high-end motherboard especially considering the
Factor as well as a three pin fan connector so we got four PW or 3 pwm and
one three pin fan controller all right let's have a look at what we got in
terms of slots so we've got a PCIe 16x slot PCIe 1X slot a PCI slot and then a
PCIe physical 16x slot but you can actually see in here the wires it's only
wired for 8X so if you were to run Crossfire X which means two discret
Graphics then you would be running it at adex
adex okay let's see what AMD says about AMD ASUS says about this board you got
dual Graphics direct X11 support what's dual Graphics well dual Graphics means
take your Apu you put it there you take your GPU you put it there and they will
actually work together kind of like a hybrid Crossfire used to do except it
actually seems to work quite well this time around so that's a pretty cool
feature uh other than that I guess they're not really saying too much about
it oh yeah this is cool check this out so this bracket here looks kind of
different from what we've seen before for on AMD motherboards but guess what
still compatible with your old AMD compatible heat sink so you've got the
same mounting holes you've got the same Clips right here so you shouldn't run
into any problems as far as using your older Solutions so you don't have to
waste money upgrading stuff that still works just fine we've got four USB three
ports on the back one of those PS2 mouse keyboard combo ports optical audio out
HDMI VGA and DVI of note is the fact
that the DVI port supports up to 25 60 x600 dual link very cool haven't seen
that on onboard Graphics yet uh two USB 2 ports an Ethernet port gigabit
Ethernet of course and 7.1 audio out thank you for checking out my unboxing
of the FM a75m Pro from ASUS don't
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